Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water
by ainokitsune
Summary: "Jesus." Jimmy sat down heavily on the sofa. "Jesus, Dean. Everything they ever said about you is true, isn't it?"  Scif-fi fic, riddled with cliches, now with chapter 9! Which is short. Whoops.
1. Chapter 1

_So I'm trying to beat my writer's block into submission, and right now the only tool available seems to be fic. So I am writing more, in this case of the 'extremely silly' variety. Basically a ridiculous SF AU extremely derivative bit of tomfoolery. Heh. "Tomfoolery."_

Warnings: Language, and um, silliness? HERE BE CLICHES. Slight violence.

* * *

**Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water**

He said, "Okay." Tried to make it sound firm, authoritative. Wasn't sure he actually managed it, but he doubted the vendor actually _noticed_ one way or another. He resisted the urge to dart his tongue quickly between his lips and ignored completely the sense of nervous sweat breaking out under his arms. He could do this. Of course he could.

"A pound, I guess," he said, ruthlessly suppressing any waver of uncertainty threatening to worm its way into his voice. "The, uh, the red ones. And some bananas. Because—" Dean strangled the rest of the sentence before it could fly out of his mouth because shit, the man didn't care _why_ he was buying the fruit. Dean could've been planning to take them down to the 'dock and fling them at random passersby and the man wouldn't've cared.

"Apples, bananas." The vendor stuffed the purchases into a sack and Dean accepted them with probably a greater air of reverence than the situation actually called for, but that wasn't really his fault.

This was a very special occasion, after all.

He kept his thanks for the man simple, a brief nod, barest flash of eye contact, before slipping out into the afternoon crowd and weaving his way between the multitude of forms. He'd had a few hours to get used to _that_, at least, and he thought all things considered he'd done a pretty good job concealing his own amazement at the sheer variety contained within this tiny microcosm of a handful of city blocks. Never mind the sheer _numbers_, and he suspected that he wasn't freaking out about it mostly due to the fact that the reality of the situation hadn't fully sunk in yet.

Castiel was waiting for him in the shadow of an overhang, between a café and what looked like some kind of library. He gave Dean a pleased little smile when he waved the evidence of his successful foray at him.

"I think," he said, as Dean approached, "I've found a place for us to stay, at least for a few days. Time to get our bearings, and earn some additional funds."

" 'Funds'." Dean tasted the word, and grinned in spite of himself. Castiel shot him a _look_.

"This is how the world operates, Dean," he said stiffly, eyes narrowed a little. Dean shrugged.

"It's just, you know," he waved his free hand in a wide, vague arc, nearly braining some hapless person behind him, "All this. And that sky. And, things I never thought I'd see." He didn't know how to explain it, really. Something as exotic as _money_.

"I know a song about the sky,"Castiel blurted, face taking on an unexpected (but not unfamiliar) expression of wide-eyed innocence before just as swiftly ratcheting back to dour, with a hearty dose of irritation thrown in. "Claire, get off the line."

"Where is the little rugrat, anyway?" Dean glanced up and down the street, but caught no sign of long blonde hair. "D'you stash her in the library?"

"At the apartment. I'm not leaving her alone in a public place. Not this close to the 'dock." His face switched again and Claire added, "Even though you totally _could_, I'm thirteen years old now and I can take care of myself! _Claire!_ For the last time get _off_ the line!"

Dean snorted and turned away. The link between Castiel, Jimmy and Claire made things confusing at the best of times, but there was no real need to exacerbate the situation by openly mocking any of them to Castiel's face. Dean had no desire to bring down any sort of wrath on himself, especially in this new and slightly terrifying situation.

"Do you think it would have been better if we left her behind?" he asked, when no further response was forthcoming from Claire and Castiel drew up next to Dean, and although he'd directed the question at Castiel, it was Jimmy looking out of the eyes when he answered.

"No."

* * *

Dean wanted Castiel to take him straight back to the "apartment," practically bouncing out of his skin with excitement at the idea. Unfortunately, it seemed there were a variety of other things that needed to be acquired at the open-air market and Dean could put aside his eagerness at the prospect of being able to buy more things, though he was a little disappointed Castiel made him tag along for the stated purpose of "doing the heavy lifting."

"We don't have to buy furniture or anything, do we?"

"No. The apartment's furnished. There's no point in getting things we might have to leave behind if we need to make a quick getaway. But we need to make sure we have the right equipment for dodging the hunters, and Claire made me promise to bring her back a toy."

Dean blinked. "A toy? Why?"

Castiel shrugged. "Who knows? Girls seem to like fuzzy soft things, even if they're well past the age when playing with them would be appropriate." He paused, head cocked slightly, eyes gone distant with an expression Dean knew all too well. Somewhere miles away, Claire was probably yelling her little golden head off. A tiny smile quirked the corner of Castiel's lips, and Dean rolled his eyes.

"Listen, why don't you just…take care of that, and I'll go look around for the rest of the little things, toothbrushes and whatever, okay? And, uh, meet you back here."

Castiel waved him off with a distracted air, and Dean snorted and sidled away, easing back out into the crowd of humanity flooding the street.

People! He'd seen pictures, of course, and video, and read books and knew, consciously, that the world and all the settlements housed well over nineteen billion human beings, in every shape, size, and color imaginable, and probably a few that weren't. Conscious awareness of something, however, was a far cry from actually experiencing it, and Dean knew that when he actually had time to decompress and process everything that had happened in the last three-and-a-half hours, he'd probably have to take a minute to huddle in a corner in the bathroom and have a long-overdue freakout. There were people with purple hair, and complicated tattoos, and children whose genetic markers he couldn't even begin to _guess_ at. And people seemed to be dressed in whatever-the-hell they felt like, some of them tottering around in shoes that should've been outlawed as cruel and unusual punishment. Dean felt grungy in the jeans and t-shirt Cas had scrounged up somewhere outside the Blue City, and he ran a hand self-consciously across the material of his shirt. It was soft to the touch, and well-worn.

Dean was basically making everything up as he went along. He was grateful that at least the crowds and buildings concealed any evidence of a horizon. He'd never have believed he had agoraphobic tendencies if it hadn't been for the disastrous near-collapse on the flight here, and Castiel had harangued him for a good half-hour for giving into what he was convinced was entirely a fabrication of Dean's mind ("What good is a phobia to anyone, Dean? You're imagining things. There's no _program_ for that kind of neurosis."). It'd taken Claire kicking him in the shin to finally shut him up. Dean had barely manage not to lose his lunch all over the three (four) of them.

He was currently mostly just ignoring the fact that the myriad faces around him were all not only wholly unfamiliar, but _completely different from one another_. He wondered what Claire thought about all this. He couldn't ask Castiel, of course—he'd retained his usual equanimity in the face of the bizarre. Jimmy might have something to say on the subject , though, and Dean resolved to ask him about it next time he got a chance. They were a lot closer in age and life experience , even if the smaller man's exposure to the outside world was being mostly buffered by Castiel's consciousness.

Ducking off the street and wandering through a small shop with the words "drug store" emblazoned on the front, Dean quickly acquired seven toothbrushes, of varying degrees of softness (why hadn't Castiel thought to explain the significance of bristle stiffness at some point in his long lecture about blending in and survival in the outside world?) some kind of toothpaste flavored like bubblegum, which Dean acquired purely to see the look on Jimmy's face, and a variety of soaps and shampoos that would probably be sufficient to keep the three of them clean well into the next millennium. He ignored the strange look the clerk kept trying to direct his way—he was a tourist, right? And tourists did all kinds of crazy inexplicable shit, it was practically expected of them—pocketed the remains of his funds (heh, 'funds') and strolled out into the street back the way he'd come.

When he finally realized he was being followed, he was halfway back to where he'd left Castiel, and the realization shocked him so completely that he actually came to a dead stop in the middle of the crowd, and only barely managed to cover his confusion by pretending to peruse the items on offer behind the nearest shop's windows. Unfortunately it was some kind of lingerie shop, and mannequins kind of gave Dean the creeps.

He should run. He knew he should run, drop everything and just go. Leave Castiel, and Claire, and Jimmy—when he didn't turn up, they'd know something had gone wrong, and maybe they'd make it out. Get away. He could buy them some time, at least.

He slipped back out into the street as nonchalantly as possible, through the spring was gone from his step and he had to concentrate to keep his mouth from setting itself into a hard line.

The problem was that Dean didn't know this place, or even this _kind_ of place. He was surrounded by unfamiliar forms and faces, random wild colors and sounds and a kind of ongoing, low-level chaos that he really couldn't make sense of. The streets were laid out haphazardly, apparently with no forethought at all, and Dean didn't know the layout, couldn't begin to _guess_ at it. The main road branched off into countless smaller footpaths and alleys and streets, and Dean turned down one at random, then when it branched picked another, and then a third. He was far away from any sort of place intended for tourists now, he knew. Not lost, but on the way.

Dean swore under his breath when another random turning brought him up short against a whitewashed wall, wrapped around somebody's property. An open sewer nearby filled the air with the smell of slime and soap, and his nostrils flared.

The hair on the back of his neck prickled and he dropped the bags of apples and soap and toothbrushes near his feet and drew one deep, steadying breath. Turned around.

"Oh," he blurted, eyebrows shooting halfway up his forehead.

He almost laughed at the two men doing their level best to loom menacingly behind him. They were big, sure, but not in a way that screamed 'well fed,' 'highly trained,' or even 'particularly stable.' The bad hair and tattoos didn't help their appearance any, and Dean felt his mouth open slightly as comprehension finally dawned.

"Muggers?" Dean wondered aloud, "I'm being _mugged?_"

He was so relieved he was inclined to just give them everything he had—they looked like they needed the soap and toothpaste a lot more than he did, anyway. He offered a little wave and pointed at the bags at his feet.

"Hey, guys," he said, with his best 'harmless nice-guy' grin, "I'm not lookin' for any trouble. You see something in there you like, you help yourselves, okay?"

But maybe that wasn't how this sort of exchange was supposed to go. Castiel would probably have something to say about alpha males and macho posturing and the human capacity for unmotivated, pointless violence, or whatever. Dean guessed they'd probably picked him out as someone alone and harmless, and in need of having his face redecorated. Because apparently that was the sort of thing people did to each other out in the real world. Dean had seen movies. He knew about this kind of stuff.

So it wasn't a major surprise when mugger (assailant?) number one, the one with a big stupid tattoo of some kind of lizard thing right across his face, lunged clumsily in his direction, fist flying wide in a poorly-executed haymaker that Dean wouldn't have believed if he hadn't seen it himself.

Dean stepped neatly out of Lizard-face's way and, as an afterthought, planted a boot behind the man's knee and shoved until something cracked. The man let loose a definitely undignified sound and faceplanted into the wall. Dean winced, but the other guy, shorter and broader and with absolutely no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, came rushing in. This time Dean simply grabbed Unremarkable Guy by the hair and swung him around, then proceeded to bounce his head off the wall a couple of times for good measure.

"What's your problem, anyway?" he demanded irritably as he released the guy to drop in a heap beside his whimpering friend. "I was trying to be _nice_."

Annoyed at the inexplicable behavior of these people whose faces, Dean realized with a strange little wrench, he would probably _never see again_, Dean snatched up his bags and, taking in the pallor of the man whose leg he'd broken, and the poor bastard whose face he'd reduced to red mush, he frowned.

"Guess I can't just leave you here to wait for help, huh?" He sighed heavily, then startled at a sudden, unexpected noise at the tail end of the sound—a kind of choked-off gasp. Raising his head sharply, he caught sight of a flash of blond hair, disappearing quickly into a large, if dilapidated, house.

"Hey!" Dean shouted, scrambling up and darting in the direction of the house, "Hey—excuse me? Miss?"

The door was closed when he clattered up the steps to the wide wooden porch, (still clutching his bags, the sort of idiotic thing Jimmy would never let him hear the end of if he found out about it), and knocked on the door. Lightly. Trying for respectful.

"Miss?" he called again. "I just—I thought maybe somebody should call—" Medical? Backup? No, what was the word? "A doctor? Or, um, the hospital? Ambulance? Hello?"

He dithered a bit on her porch, trying to ignore the still-audible noise of the two men behind him alternating between whimpering and softly crying. He didn't want to feel guilty dammit; _they_ were the ones who'd attacked _him_. So he should just take his apples and toothpaste and go find Cas and the others. Go far away. Never wander down this particular road in this particular town in this particular settlement for the rest of his unnatural life.

He knocked again.

"Miss?"

When the door opened, when it clicked and Dean got a good look at the person filling the doorway, he literally clamped his tongue between his teeth to prevent the words that tried to leap out of his mouth from escaping.

"I've called the police." The figure said. "Go away."

Dean grinned a sickly grin. Backed up a bit. Looked up into long eyes he knew better than his own. Took in the fall of surprisingly long, but familiar, brown hair. Noted the shape of the jaw, the set of the shoulders, the uneasy stance.

He didn't say, "Sam." (Sammy.) Didn't say anything. Just backed away, rictus plastered on his face, and narrowly avoided tumbling backward down the stairs.

In the distance, a siren was drawing closer. Dean tore his eyes away from the strange, familiar, terrible figure in the doorway, turned almost a full circle in sudden geographical confusion, and finally nearly sprinted back the way he'd come.

Jesus. _Jesus_. How? It wasn't possible. It was unthinkable, beyond the realm of possibility. Like the sun coming out at night.

He knew what Castiel would say, or even Claire. Eyes all big and serious, with that shared genetic predisposition to distant compassion.

"It isn't him," they'd say, and Dean would be forced to agree. "He's not _your_ Sam."

And he'd say, "I know," without looking directly at either of them. "I know."

Because Dean's Sam was dead.

* * *

tbc or something...

* * *

_Heh._

_Every time I tried to write this over the past few weeks, it invariably started with some version of Castiel calling Dean an idiot and/or blaming him for something. Like, "This is the worst idea you've ever had," or, "This is all your fault." Also, "I can't believe I let you talk us into this," and "This whole thing is insane."_

_So the new opening isn't a whole lot better. But I changed it because I refuse to be bullied into writing stuff by my own brain. Here's a bit of the snark I wrote a while back:_

"This whole thing is insane," Castiel said, and Dean grinned.

"Think they've started looking for us yet?"

"Dean, they started looking for us the moment somone looked in your room and noticed you were gone. It would've only taken about _five minutes_ for them to realize that I was gone, too."

"Because we're such good buddies."

"Because I don't have the good sense not to listen to you," he ground out, and Dean's grin seemed to widen, if such a thing was even physically possible.

"Stop doing that before your face splits in half," Castiel told him.

_There's a bit more, mostly about Dean's phobia of flight, and Castiel ragging on him. What can I say? Their relationship just makes me want to write snark. *shrugs*  
__


	2. Chapter 2

**Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water 2/?**

Sam shut the door quietly and looked over at Jess. His girlfriend sat on the couch nursing her original cup of tea—the one he'd fetched before the first cop came knocking at the door, asking for a statement.

The blue and red lights still pulsed through the sheer curtains, but the bustle and noise had mostly died down after the injured men had been carted away and the area of the attack closed off until further notice. Now Sam crossed to the couch and settled himself carefully. Jess smiled wanly at him

"This has been a _really_ weird day," she offered. Sam snorted a startled laugh.

"It's kind of a dangerous neighborhood." He pulled her in close, tightening his arm around her shoulders, stealing her tea and sipping it before making a face. "We should get you something. Something you can use to defend yourself."

"What, like…pepper spray?" she made a face.

"Yeah, or a stun gun, or one of those immobilizers. Something easy to use."

"I don't really want—"

"Jess," he whispered, "I couldn't forgive myself if something ever happened to you."

She shifted against him, "Did the police know anything? About what…?"

"Mm-mm." He shook his head. "They thought maybe it was some kind of, I dunno, like a mugging gone wrong."

"That guy…he really—he hurt those men."

"Pretty efficiently, I guess. Well, except for the one guy's face…"

"Jesus." She shuddered. "And then he came _here._ Why was he _here?_"

"You know," he murmured, nestling is chin in her soft blond hair and gazing at the far way, "I have no idea."

* * *

The apartment was really too small for three people, even if one of them was a half-pint. Dean paced the small floor and ran a hand over his hair, trying to ignore the looks he was garnering from his companions.

"Look," he said patiently, "For the last time, I didn't say it was _my_ Sam. I said it was _a_ Sam, okay?" He paused. "I'm not crazy."

"We're not saying you are," Jimmy said in conciliatory tones from his perch on the edge of the desk. "It just sounds like a pretty, uh, amazing coincidence, y'know? We make planetfall and, what, four hours later you just happen to stumble across a Sam? A _Sam,_ Dean? I mean, really?_"_

"It does sort of stretch the boundaries of probability," Castiel said, regarding him with Claire's serious round eyes, seated on one of the beds in a nest of cables and delicate spider-silk filaments. "It's not that we don't believe _you_, Dean."

"I know what I saw, okay?" He sank down on the beat-to-hell armchair, ignored the way it squeaked mournfully at him, and ran a hand down his face. "It was definitely a Sam. His hair was longer and he was wearing, like," he waved a hand vaguely at his own cotton-and-denim getup, "_people_ clothes, but that's _it._ Everything else was the same."

"Did he recognize you?" Jimmy asked.

"I—" Dean blinked. "No. I didn't think about it—but no." He shook his head. "I think he was a little scared of me, to be honest."

Castiel snorted and Dean glared at her. Jimmy said, "So was he _Sam?_ Or was there, you know—someone else inside? Was he just, y'know, a vessel?"

Dean paused, squinting his eyes as he cast back through his memory of the strange meeting.

"He said…that he'd called the police. He…no, he sounded like Sam. His voice, his…speech, I guess. It was Sam's. No one else was in there."

Castiel said, "Are you sure?"

"I wouldn't make a mistake like that."

"Look," she said, "This makes no sense. If there'd been—if someone, if a _Sam_, for pity's sake, had escaped, don't you think at least _one_ of us would have _heard_ about it?"

"It does seem pretty unlikely," Jimmy agreed.

"I know." Dean leaned on his elbows and shoved a hand through his short hair. "Somebody would have said something. _Sam _would have heard about it."

"Or one of the Deans," Jimmy added.

"Or one of—" He broke off. "_Jesus._"

"Dean?"

"I just—if Sam's here—you think maybe…I mean…."

"Another Dean?" Castiel supplied.

"It could happen," came from Jimmy.

"This is _insane!_" Dean shot to his feet. "We can't stay here—there's no way we won't attract attention this way!"

"Whoah, hey, calm down." Jimmy crossed the room and lightly pushed at Dean's shoulder, until he settled back into the chair. "Freaking out isn't going to help. We're here now, we can't just run off half-cocked."

"If there's a Sam, and another Dean, and _us_ all here in this town _at the same time_ then it'll be that much easier for them to track us. There's no way they won't! The psychic feedback alone—"

"Hey!" Jimmy shoved at his shoulder and Dean subsided. "Calm down, okay? We'll figure it out. We're laying low, nothing dramatic is happening right now—relax. We've got the early-warning systems in place and Castiel will know if any hunters get within range. We have time to figure this thing out."

Dean groaned and buried his face in his hands.

"Look," Jimmy said, "You need to move around. So do I. Let's just—get your gear, okay, and we'll do a circuit of the neighborhood. Castiel can trawl the local newsfeeds and security networks, and keep an eye out for hunters, and anything else for that matter. She's finishing setting up our ward protocols anyway—another hour and this place'll be more secure than a deep-six lockdown room."

"There's no way hunters won't come," Dean muttered. "We should bail now."

"Oh?" Castiel cocked her head at him, pausing in her efforts to fit together two apparently identical pieces of cabling. "You're going to leave when you know there's a Sam in the immediate area? Really, Dean?"

Dean glanced at Jimmy, but the smaller man was pulling weaponry from a bag and didn't even bother to meet his eyes.

"Fine," Dean muttered, knowing he'd been defeated by his own programming. "But we're not stalking the guy, alright?"

That at least elicited a snort from Jimmy, and Dean glared at the disbelieving smirk on the other man's face. Castiel moved off the bed and with a gesture fired up two monitors and the rack of scavenged hardware squatting in the corner, then started futzing around with cables and onboard ports.

"Keep your transceiver open," she told Jimmy, "But maintain radio silence, please. I'll keep a ded-pock-app open for your data stream." She unwound the scarf from her head and with quick deft hands rammed the jack directly into the newly-installed port at the base of her skull. Dean winced.

"Right." Jimmy answered, sliding a long, lethal blade up one sleeve. Dean belatedly grabbed for his own weapons, darts and knives and a light, easily concealed handgun loaded with personal-armor-piercing rounds.

"Keep the home fires burning," he told Castiel as they filed out the main entrance (just a door, really), Jimmy in the lead. Castiel waved Claire's small hand at them without turning, and Dean rolled his eyes before hustling out the door after the older man.

"We're going up, right?" he asked, and Jimmy gave him a _look._

"Why, because you're Batman?"

Dean shrugged.

"Don't you have agoraphobia?"

"What? No!" he bristled. "Just because _flying_ freaks me out—you think I've never been off the ground floor before, Jesus—"

"Okay okay." Jimmy held up his hands in a conciliatory gesture and grinned, and Dean realized he'd been had.

"C'mon," he grumbled, casting around for the quickest way to the nearest roof. "I wanna get a look at the layout of this place before Castiel gets it all mapped and tries to download it directly into my brain or something."

Jimmy grinned at him again, but followed wordlessly as Dean darted down the nearest alley, hoisted himself on a dumpster and quickly scaled a fire escape to the top of a three-story building.

They prowled the rooftops slowly, committing the map of the neighborhood to memory, marking desirable escape routes, secondary tracks, ideal concealment locations, dead-ends. Peered into the crowds for the telltale signs of hunters: swift, purposeful movements, sharp eyes, outlines indicating concealed weaponry.

"They might not have tracked us this far, you know," Jimmy said quietly as they stood eight stories above the marketplace, watching the swirl of strange bodies and the multitude of colors. Dean shrugged.

"We can't afford to take anything for granted," he said. "C'mon, let's widen the circuit a little. I'll show you Sam's house."

"House_?"_ Jimmy repeated. "Sam has a _house?_"

Dean grinned.

* * *

Gordon Walker was an excellent hunter. He knew this to be a fact. He'd worked for the Blue City since he was 21 and fresh from the front, and never regretted taking the work. Sure, the extra training was a pain, and the giving up any chance of having a 'normal' life, family, job, or home kind of sucked ass, but all that was a small price to pay in order to work for the organization that made victory against the insurgents possible. Three years at the front had given him a special understanding of the nature of the enemy, their ruthlessness and resourcefulness, and he knew that without the efforts of those at the City, the settlements would have long ago been lost to the destabilizing effects of the ongoing conflict.

So now he sat in the shade of a charming café on the St. Sebastian settlement orbiting platform about fifty klicks from the main spaceport/orbital elevator, and sipped at his cappuccino with vanilla and hazelnut. Beside him, Kubrick sniffed suspiciously at a licorice-flavored biscotti, then bit into it delicately.

"Okay, seriously? We know they're in town, we can hunt 'em down in ten minutes flat the first time one of 'em fires up a transceiver—"

"So while we wait," Gordon interrupted smoothly, "We may as well take in the sights. When's the last time you were ever off-planet?"

"Since I left the front? Um, _never_. I like keeping my feet on the ground, dammit. I was born in _Idaho_."

Gordon glanced under the table. "They're on the ground."

"No. They're not. We're a hundred and fifty thousand miles _from the moon_, Gordon. I never wanted to be this close to that rock again unless I was killing something."

"No killing on this mission," Gordon told him mildly. "Straight bag-and-tag, and ship 'em back where they belong. Engineers'll work out the rest of the problems on a diagnostic table."

"And what about Castiel?"

Gordon shrugged. "That's need-to-know, and I guess I didn't need to. It's low-level, though, so probably just a glitch or something. Or maybe they'll wipe it and start over—who knows? Who cares? We just do our jobs, take care of business…" he trailed off, cup halfway to his lips, and slowly lowered it to the table. Flailed a hand at Kubrik and managed to latch onto a wrist.

"Hey-!" the other man yelped.

"Shut up," he breathed. "Are you seeing this?"

"Seeing wha—holy—is that-?"

Gordon grinned. Across the road an unmistakable figure was making its way through the crowd, head a few inches above nearly everyone else.

"That's a _Sam_."

* * *

tbh? Maaaaaybeeee...

* * *

Fear the cliches! Liek WHOAH


	3. Chapter 3

**Every Snowflake is a Drop of Water 3/?**

Sam let the noise of the marketplace wash over him. Once upon a time, he'd found exposure to the crowds and chaos jarring, even overwhelming, but after four years in St. Sebastian, three of those spent enrolled in the local university, he now found the controlled mayhem soothing, even homey. Where once he would have flinched away from the crowds of tourists and locals, students and townies, vendors and pickpockets and prostitutes, he now wove his way through without sparing them more than the barest glance.

He wondered idly where a person could go around here to buy some sort of weapon. He guessed there probably wouldn't be much to be had in the same local marketplace that sold fresh vegetables and deodorant and the latest electronic gadgets; it was probably the sort of thing you had to buy online. Yet he couldn't shake this feeling that, for some reason, he'd be deeply uncomfortable acquiring something he saw on a screen and couldn't first hold in his hand. Couldn't test the balance, weight, the feel of it in his grasp…

Sam made a face at himself. He'd never held anything more dangerous than a kitchen knife in his whole life. This was probably some latent macho tendency rearing its ugly head. Jess would never let him hear the end of it if she found out (which was why he wasn't going to mention anything about it). Anyway, it wasn't as if he was going to run off and start buying, like, butterfly knives or, or sawed-off shotguns or anything.

_Jesus, what the hell's the matter with me?_

He shook his head, pushing away the slightly disturbing train of thought, and made an effort to return to more ordinary shopping concerns. He picked up more of Jess's herbal tea, some vegetables for dinner, some toiletries they were running low on. Ordinary things which were not in any way sharp, or capable of perforating another human being. Well, aside from the safety razors, and in very special circumstances, the carrots…yeah, he seriously needed to get off this train of thought right now.

Just as he was preparing to head back, weaving his way through the crowds toward familiar back roads that would keep him well out of the way of the touristy hot spots most locals avoided like the plague, he was brought up short by an unexpected flicker of motion at the edge of his vision. He slowed in the middle of the road as he felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end—an eerie sensation he couldn't recall having ever experienced before. He cast around, up and down the street, suddenly glad for his nearly freakish height that let him see clearly above nearly every other person around.

His fingers itched, shifted and curled as if expecting some familiar, comfortable weight. Something heavy, solid, reassuring….

"Jesus," he muttered.

_What the hell's going on?_

Sam slipped to the side of the road, out of the crowd, past an open-air café where a half-empty cup of cappuccino and a plate of biscotti sat abandoned and forlorn at an empty table. He paused, looking down at the crumbs and wrinkling his nose at the distinctive odor of anise wafting up from the pile of cookies. He lifted a hand to rub and the back of his neck, and shivered without knowing why.

He turned sharply and strode along the side street as quickly as he could, long legs eating up the ground. Past familiar landmarks—the drug store, the little park swarming with kids, the liquor store, the corner deli—his speed increasing along with his growing sense of unease. Until he was practically sprinting. Until he finally gave up all pretense of calm, of normalcy, and dropped the bags by the side of the road and broke into a flat-out run.

He gasped aloud when his house (_their_ house) hove into view, pounded up the stairs without slowing, and banged through the front door.

"Jess!" he shouted, voice bouncing off the walls.

But it wasn't Jess standing in the living room, wasn't Jess that turned to face Sam smiling a terrible smile.

"Hello, Sammy," said the man in his house, and Sam reacted without thinking.

He only realized he'd made a fist when he felt the pain in his knuckles from the impact with the stranger's face. He was halfway across the room and the sudden awareness of the motion disoriented him, enough to allow the other man to land two unexpected blows to his ribs and sternum, sending him staggering backward, gasping and clutching at his chest.

"Well, look at you," his attacker said, grinning, "The one that got away."

* * *

"This," Jimmy declared, glancing around with something very much like disdain on his face, "is kind of a crappy neighborhood."

Dean snorted. "How the hell would you know?" He demanded, "You've spent exactly as much time on the Outside as I have! Don't wave that middle-class attitude around as if it's _yours_, you wannabe."

"Hey, I've seen pictures!" the smaller man retorted hotly, "And…movies and videos and…stuff."

"Yeah, yeah." Dean waved a dismissive hand, then gestured suddenly at the street below, specifically at the black-and-yellow police tape surrounding a white wall still smeared with rust brown. "Look! That's where two guys tried to mug me!"

"You're a lunat—," Jimmy began, but broke off, eyes narrowing, as a familiar figure came pelting up the road and crashed through the front door of the house they'd perched across the street from.

"Jesus," he whispered, "His _hair."_

Dean shot to his feet. Something was _wrong._ Sam was—Sam needed—

"Come on," he said shortly, as Sam's hoarse cry of _Jess!_ floated up to their ears. "We need to get down there."

"Dean! Hold on!" Jimmy snapped, and clamped a hand on his arm. "You're going to just, what, barge in there armed and ready for a fight?"

Dean bristled. "Yeah, I'm 'just gonna barge in'—something's _wrong_, I can _feel_ it." He had a job to do, one job, the same job he'd had his whole life. _Take care of Sam._ Every cell in his body strained toward the run-down house below, toward the noise of violence. Toward _Sammy. _Adrenaline surged through his bloodstream, his skin breaking out in goosebumps, hands clenching and unclenching.

"He's not _your Sam_," Jimmy ground out, shaking Dean a little, "You _know _he's not, he didn't even recognize you, you've never seen him before and until an hour ago you had no idea he even _existed_. Plus, you're on the Outside, you have Castiel and Claire to worry about, and you're not even _trying _to get past your programming, are you?"

Dean glared, but Jimmy'd known him (and his model type) for far too long, and he gazed back with deceptive passivity, unmoved by Dean's distress. He didn't even flinch when a resounding crash splintered the air. Dean, on the other hand, winced sharply and actually bit his lip, looking first down at the house before sending a pleading glance Jimmy's way.

"It's _Sam,_" he whispered. "I can't just—I can't stand by and do _nothing_."

Jimmy pressed his lips together and wordlessly regarded Dean for far longer than seemed necessary, while the unmistakable noises of a serious throwdown continued to erupt from the house below. Finally he shook his head and snorted.

"Fine," he bit out, jabbing a long finger at Dean's chest, "But if this goes bad, I'm pinning all the blame it for it on _you_."

Dean didn't bother to respond beyond grinning hugely and slapping a hand on the other man's shoulder before scrambling for the edge of the building.

* * *

Sam smashed bodily into the coffee table and felt it collapse under him. The man, the—whatever-he-was, efficient and lethal and constantly smiling—paced closer, pulled a collapsible baton from somewhere and whip-cracked it to its full length. Sam scrambled back, out of the wreckage of the destroyed furniture, planting one hand on an armrest of the old, beaten-up couch and hauling himself to his feet.

"Who are you?" he demanded, trying to force his shaking legs to steady by sheer force of will, trying to ignore the accompanying tremble in his throat. Smiley shrugged, swinging the weapon almost idly, circling around and forcing Sam to shuffle to keep him directly in front.

"This is just a lucky break for me," Smiley observed, as calm as if they were two friends meeting on the street. "But look at _you_, Sam. All—" and he waved the baton in his direction, apparently indicating his clothes, "Playing dress-up. And that _hair._"

A muffled shriek from another room yanked both their attention to the doorway and Sam choked on his horror when another man, more grizzled than Smiley, manhandled a struggling Jessica Moore into the room.

"You bastard!" Sam shouted, lunging for her, "Let her g—!"

Agony erupted across the back of his neck and his vision whited out. He felt his knees hit the floor, and an instant later a boot planted on his shoulder and shoved him to the floor, face-up.

When his vision cleared Smiley was standing over him, one foot lightly resting on his throat. Jess remained clasped in the arms of the other man, his hand clamped across her mouth, her right arm twisted up behind her back.

"Aw, lookie here, Kubrick," Smiley observed, waving his baton in Sam's direction, amusement evident in his voice. "It thinks it's _people._"

Kubrick gave a closed-mouth smile and Sam realized with slow horror that they were referring to _him_.

"Let's bag-and-tag this one," Smiley said, extracting a set of zip-ties from somewhere and kneeling roughly on Sam's chest, binding his wrists with alarming efficiency. "We need to get back to—" but he broke off sharply and jerked his head in the direction of a tiny noise coming from the back of the house. A sound like a lock, clicking, and a door opening, slowly.

"Shit!" he was on his feet and moving in that direction so quickly Sam flinched, and Kubrick yanked Jess backward and out of his path, though he made no move to release her. Sam squirmed, pulling at the bindings on his wrist.

"Jess—" he began, but never managed to get any more words out as Smiley crashed backwards into the room, arms flailing, followed shortly after by the _same man from the failed mugging an hour ago_.

"What the f—" Sam again lost his train of thought as both Smiley and his larger opponent lunged for each other, and he caught the unmistakable flash of a blade even as he flinched and scrambled backward as best he could without his hands, out of the way of the fight.

_Shit,_ his brain supplied helpfully, _Shit shit shit._ When had his life (and his house!) become some kind of insane battleground for highly-trained, violent lunatics? Because it was obvious that the newcomer was at least as combat-ready as his opponent, movements tight and controlled, expression focused but weirdly calm as he hammered at the smaller man. Kubrick remained off to the side, clearly unwilling to intervene and release his hostage.

More furniture got smashed. Smiley and his opponent were apparently taking turns slamming each other into walls and tables, and Sam winced when his would-be kidnapper was shoved bodily into a cabinet, glass and wood shattering. Smiley's head lolled, eyes fluttering, and that seemed to be enough to get Kubrick motivated.

"Gordon!" He shouted, "_Gordon!"_

Sam almost groaned aloud at the arrival of a _fourth_ unexpected man, this one on the slender side, gliding smoothly into the room and reaching for Sam before Kubrick could so much as lunge in Gordon's direction.

"Dean!" the new addition shouted, laying one hand on Sam's head and reaching forward with the other, even as Kubrick shoved Jessica away from him and snapped his hands up, a nasty-looking handgun pointed into the room. _"Dean!"_

'Dean' let Smiley—Gordon—slump unceremoniously to the floor and lunged across the room, belly-sliding, reaching out for the new man's other hand even as Kubrick started shouting at them to _Drop your weapons get on the floor put your hands where I can see the now now now!_ And Sam for some reason instinctively shut his eyes and turned his head away as the two newcomers clasped hands and a terrible light screamed into the room, burning afterimages across the insides of his eyelids.

He heard Jess cry out, one last time, and then the rush of wind and the sound of wings swallowed up everything.

* * *

_Don't worry, I do know almost exactly where I'm going with this. And I'm quite pleased at the surprising ease with which the main story components of Supernatural can be made to fit into a sci-fi future-y dramedy._


	4. Chapter 4

_I've had this mostly written for the past two weeks, but was finishing up some other fics and didn't have time to sit down with this, so that's why it's been so long delayed. I should have the next part up soon, I think._

_

* * *

_

**Every Snowflake… 4/?**

Sam kept his eyes closed and his breathing even. He lay as still as he could, despite the litany clawing at his brain of "Jess, save Jess find Jess get Jess Jess _Jess._" He was painfully aware of the sensations around him: the odors of cheap detergent, mold, and human bodily odors, all squeezed uncomfortably into a too-small space. A strange space. He wasn't home anymore, Sam knew that much. His home smelled of spices, sweet tea and cloves, and Jess's favorite perfume. This place, wherever it was, had none of those homey qualities.

What it did have, was voices. Angry voices.

"Why the hell did you bring us back _here_, you idiot?"

"This place is very effectively shielded, Dean. They're no more likely to track us here than if I'd taken us to the other side of the platform."

_Dean._ The man who wouldn't be mugged. The man who'd kicked the everloving crap out of one Gordon, last name unknown, kidnapper and would-be Sam-napper. His voice, when he responded to the nearly-growled statement Sam barely understood, was rough and edged with tension.

"For how long? They know we're here, the whole deal's just gotten sweeter now they know _we_ know about Sam here—"

"And whose fault is that?"

"Oh no, you're not pinning this one on me, Cas, you know damn well that I—"

_Cas. _The one with the voice like a boulder being crushed under a whole bunch of other boulders, the one, Sam guessed, who'd performed the terrifying little miracle, or whatever it was, back there and yanked them all out of the combat zone…

Combat zone. Living room. Whatever.

"Dean, try to settle down, okay? This room's too small for you to have one of your tantrums."

That was a new voice. Young and female, flecked with annoyance and something like concern.

"I don't have tantrums!"

"Well, if you keep raising your voice you're going to wake up sleeping beauty over there."

"Who, him? He's not asleep." Dean's voice changed in pitch, and a sudden kick rocked whatever Sam was lying on. "You're not asleep, are ya, Sam? C'mon, open them baby blues. The world's waiting to say hello."

Sam winced internally, but there was no point in continuing to disseminate. Yet he felt himself resisting the command as if instinctually, and was surprised at the reluctance with which he finally managed to pry his own eyes open.

The room swam into view, just as the crushing-boulder voice of Cas observed, "Sam doesn't have blue eyes, Dean—"

"Figure of speech, Cas," Dean remarked offhandedly, and Sam's eyes wandered over the faces of his new kidnappers. Cas stood near the far wall, awkwardly posed as if unsure of the best possible reaction to Dean's declaration of Sam's consciousness. He was, as Sam had seen, on the slim side, dark-haired and unsmiling. His gaze was…weirdly intense, eyes larger than they had any business being in a scruffy-looking, square-jawed face. He appeared to be somewhere in his mid-thirties, and needed a shave.

Sam's gaze lingered for a moment on a little blonde girl, about thirteen or so, perched on the edge of a desk cluttered with a terrifying array of computer parts and God knew what else. Her head was wrapped in a bright scarf and she cocked her head and regarded him with suddenly familiar blue eyes. Sam's gaze flicked back and forth between Cas and the girl. Definitely related, or at least connected in some way.

He let his eyes wander around the room and confirm some of his suspicions about where they were now. The space was definitely small, old, badly wallpapered and yes, smelled faintly of mold. Old black cobwebs hung in at least one corner and spots of fungus dotted the walls near the ceiling. There were probably spiders, and cockroaches. Even in space, there were always spiders and cockroaches.

Sam finally pushed himself upright and let his gaze fall on the other man in the room. He'd seen Dean before, of course, but he took a moment now to catalogue the new bruises on his face and the hard set of his jaw and eyes, which had most definitely not been part of the package when he'd stood on Sam's front porch some indeterminate amount of time ago and stammered about an ambulance. His mouth was pressed into a hard line and his whole body radiated tension. Sam felt his own jaw try to clench in sympathy, and forced himself to relax. Tried to pull his gaze away, let his eyes travel around the room a little more, maybe gather some further information…but to Sam's surprise that didn't seem to be happening. His eyes pulled as if of their own accord back in the direction of the other man. Dean caught the gesture and his own eyes narrowed, ever so slightly, and his nostrils flared. Sam tried not to wince.

_He's angry,_ Sam realized, and blinked rapidly at himself and the answer to a question he hadn't even asked. _He's furious with…himself._ He inhaled sharply and looked away, at the wall with its godawful wallpaper. He knew. He _knew_ that Dean was upset, could see it in the set of his shoulders, in the way he held himself. It was so _obvious_, it might as well have been written in twenty-foot high neon letters.

"Uh," Sam said.

"It speaks!" That from the girl, voice clipped and intelligent. Sam winced and pushed himself fully into a sitting position.

"How did you know I was awake?" he asked Dean. The older man regarded him for a moment, expression unreadable.

"That's not important right now," he said finally, quietly, far more quietly than Sam had heard him speak until now. He took a breath, and visibly forced himself to relax. He waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the door. "Listen, I'm just gonna, um, take a walk, get some fresh air—"

"You can't wander around randomly!" the girl snapped, and Dean scowled.

"Claire…" Cas murmured, but Dean shook his head sharply, at himself or the girl, Sam couldn't tell. Claire would not be deterred.

"Dean, don't you _dare_ go out there—or just, don't go alone, okay? Take Cas, or at least Jimmy."

_Jimmy? _Was there a _fourth_ member of their little troupe? How could they possible all fit in this tiny space?

"I need to—" Dean began, but Cas left his post by the wall and waved a hand.

"Jimmy can go. I'll stay here. For Sam's own good. Just—stay out of sight, okay? Both of you."

Dean gave a sharp nod and Cas turned, smiling at Claire…and there was a moment. Something. A crackle in the air, a slight flickering of the lights. On the desk, Claire straightened, slid to perch lightly on floor. Cas nodded once, briefly, and Sam shivered. He didn't know what had just happened. What he'd just seen. But Cas looked…different, now. Somehow. Carried himself differently.

Put his hands in his pockets.

"Let's go," he said to Dean, and even his voice was changed. Lighter, less gravelly. Sam edged his feet toward the floor, but froze when Dean flicked a sharp glance in his direction. Looking back at Claire, he addressed her with hard, serious eyes.

"_Watch him,_" he intoned, and Claire nodded without speaking, as if a girl under five feet tall could offer a real challenge to someone of Sam's stature. She stood still as the two men left the room.

Same expected, after they were gone, that the tension would ease, the atmosphere become less charged. It did, in a way, as the girl seemed little interested in scrutinizing Sam's every move and in fact had moved toward the window and was peering out, before twitching the curtain back in place and shaking her head with a little sigh.

Sam swallowed. A host of questions were clamoring for his attention—_How did I get here? Who are you people? Why did they leave a little girl alone with a full-grown man as if I'd be no kind of threat at all?_—along with the bone-deep fire of terror for Jess, for what might be happening to her _right now._ Yet when he opened and shut his mouth no sound emerged, aside from a quiet clicking of his teeth encountering each other. Claire turned from her position by the window.

"Sam," she said, flatly.

All the hair on the back of Sam's neck stood up.

"Who are you?" he whispered. The girl cocked her head, face startlingly impassive, and regarded him for a long, uncomfortable moment.

"It's better I don't tell you anything at this stage," she said, finally, still in that flat voice. It seemed…deeper, somehow. Almost familiar. As if…as if he'd heard it before. Heard it…recently.

_Jesus._

"Wh-what are you?" he breathed, and didn't know whether to be relieved or not when no answer beyond an enigmatic smile was forthcoming.

"Are you hungry?" Claire—the girl, the…_whatever_—asked solicitously, heading for a collection of bags piled in one corner of the room, and Sam realized that he'd seen a few of the bags before.

"_I've called the police,"_ he'd said. _"Go away."_

And Dean had stood there on the porch with these bags in his hands. He'd been…shopping. Shopping! Buying—apples, apparently, he realized when Claire, or whoever she was, pulled a shining red globe from the recesses of one, and lobbed it at Sam. He fumbled it, managed to juggle the fruit around awkwardly and tried to ignore the expression of vague amusement on the girl's face at his consternation.

He scooted forward on the bed—one of two in the room, he realized, along with a beaten-down armchair—and planted his feet firmly on the floor.

"I have to find Jess," he declared, maintaining his grip on the apple. Claire regarded him coolly.

"Of course you do," she said calmly.

"I mean, I have to find her. _Now_. I have to go—right now. I have to—"

"Sam," the girl said, and he shut up. Didn't mean to, but his mouth snapped closed without any input from his brain. He stared at her.

"You're going to find her," she said. "Jess. You'll find her. She's going to be okay."

He started to get up. "I don't have time for—"

"_Sam._" And this time her voice arrested him physically, so that he was only halfway to a standing position, hunched over awkwardly.

Claire said, "I can't let you leave this room. It isn't safe."

"Safe?" His voice rose in pitch and almost without thinking he rose to his full height, a height which he knew to be intimidating to fully-grown men. "_Safe?_ You people—you—you_ kidnapped_ me! All of you! Oh my God, I've been kidnapped by a _teenager_, Jesus H. Christ!"

"Sam. Sit. Down. _Now._" A thirteen-year-old girl's voice should not _rumble_. But Claire's did. Sam half-expected the walls to shake. His knees buckled. He sat.

"Jess will be fine. Mostly fine. Gordon and the other hunter—they have no interest in her. She's a civilian, and their jurisdiction has nothing to do with people like her."

"_Mostly fine_? That's supposed to make me feel better?" he paused. "And what's a hunter, anyway?"

The girl blew air through her nose in something like a sigh, then shakes her head. For a moment something flickered across her features, briefly softening the too-old expression on her young face. Something like…sadness? Regret?

On whose behalf?

"I think I should wait to tell you these things, Sam." She gave a smile that could only be described as 'rueful,' and added, "In fact, I don't think I should be the one to explain these things at all. I think I should leave that to Dean."

Sam stared at her. Looked helplessly around at the little room, the broken-down chair and the bed where he'd been lying, the cluttered desk and single window, the cobwebs and mold and dust and the strange little girl who, he was starting to suspect, was not a little girl at all.

He looked down at the apple in his hand. When he bit into it, the juice ran down his chin. Sam shut his eyes.

* * *

_tbc_


	5. Chapter 5

_Hey, look at that._

_

* * *

_

**Every Snowflake… 5/?**

"Well, this is another fine mess," Jimmy griped. Dean grimaced but didn't turn around to face the smaller man. Instead he continued along his trajectory as quickly as his recently acquired, second-hand boots would allow.

"Dean." His ears pricked at the sound of Jimmy drawing closer, and he hunched his shoulders in anticipation of a forestalling hand which did not come. (Still waiting for Sam's gestures.) Instead Jimmy reiterated, "Dean," softly, and continued, "What are we doing about this?"

"_Hell_, Jimmy, I don't know," Dean blurted, coming to a full stop and waving an arm a little wildly. "This wasn't exactly something any of us planned for, Jesus!"

"I know _that,_" Jimmy scowled and Dean clearly heard the unvoiced _you idiot_ tacked on to the end of the sentence. He shoved his hands in his pockets and glowered at Dean. "But we're stuck in this situation _now_. We're gonna have to do _something._ Something more proactive than flailing and whining."

"We could just take him back to the hunters," Dean offered, quirking a little smile which died a sad and lonely death in the face of Jimmy's glare. Dean slumped.

"We're screwed, aren't we?"

"Well…" surprisingly, Jimmy's voice softened. "We were pretty screwed long before we came anywhere near St. Sebastian, Dean. Things might've gotten more…uh, complicated…but we'll deal. I guess. I mean, what else _can_ we do?"

Dean folded his arms and gazed into the glassed-over, artificial sky of the orbiting platform. "We could call the cops. Report a kidnapping."

"You want to inform on _yourself?_" Damn, Jimmy did incredulously snarky really well.

"Not—what? No! The girl, I meant the girl. Jen or whatever. Report her missing. Jesus."

"They'll pick up any activity like that. The hunters. We won't be able to run far enough."

"Castiel could drop an anonymous tip, or stick something in the network."

"Dean, the local P.D. is no match for two company-trained hunters, and you know it. Don't be silly."

"We _left_ her there, Jimmy."

"She's a civilian. She'll be fine." He paused. "Mostly."

" 'Mostly'," Dean repeated darkly. "Christ. Outside for five minutes and already we're as bad as real people."

"We're going to have to think like real people from now on, Dean," Jimmy told him flatly. "We don't have the luxury of doing anything else."

"Shit," Dean observed.

"And of course that's not even the biggest problem."

Dean winced. He'd been trying to forget familiar eyes and long stupid hair. Trying, and almost managing. In the sense of not really managing at all.

"We could…I dunno. Tranq him and stick him on a flight to Nova Scotia. Or, like, New Seoul." He paused. "The moon."

"They'll follow him. They've got his scent. You _know_ they'll follow him."

Dean said, "This is all our fault."

"Pretty much, yeah."

He pressed his lips together, wavering from foot to foot, then shook his head sharply. He knew where he should be. He _should_ be back at the room, dealing with the situation, instead of leaving…Sam…to be babysat by Cas and probably trying to climb the walls in frustration. There was no way he was suffering his unexpected captivity mildly; there'd never been a Sam in the history of the program who was capable of keeping his mouth shut when he was pissed off. And there was no possibility that Sam wasn't pissed as hell right about now.

"Come on," he said, starting to turn around, to head back and be the responsible older 'sibling' he was supposed to be. "Let's get the lead out—" but he was prevented from finishing the rest of his sentence by Jimmy's hand unexpectedly latching onto his arm, far too tightly for comfort. He looked sharply at the older man.

"Dean," Jimmy said, eyes tight, fixed on some point down the street. "Get out of here. Go."

Dean followed the direction his gaze, eyes widening.

"Get to Sam. Save Claire. _Go now_."

* * *

"That's it," Sam said, "I'm getting out of here."

The girl (Claire or GLaDOS or Major Kusanagi or what-the-hell-ever) had apparently lapsed into some kind of trance thing, which was _incredibly_ creepy, seated at the desk and facing the collection of what _should_ have been derelict machines and tangled wires with her eyes partially closed, her back to him. Occasionally she made a small atonal humming noise that reminded him, weirdly, of singing bowls or the chanting of priests. She was really, really freaking him out.

He'd finished the apple ages ago and had dithered about whether to search the room for a trashcan, or stay put and avoid the wrath of the deeply unnerving child. He'd sat on the edge of the bed with the gradually browning apple core perched between thumb and forefinger, licking his lips as they grew increasingly dry and alternately shooting glances between Claire and the door. The closed door. The closed door that even now beckoned him, promising freedom. Promising escape from this sudden and bizarre situation. Promising, above all else, _Jess_.

But he had a feeling. Just a feeling, nothing to really base it on, call it a hunch, that if he moved so much as a muscle, his tiny watchdog would know. Might, in fact, be aware even before he had actually made any motion. He was probably overreacting. Sure, he was overreacting. Absolutely.

He shot a glance at her be-scarved head, and licked dry lips. Looked back at the door. Looked, ridiculously, at the apple core in his hand, as if it might hold some sort of answers about his next best move. All it held were seeds. Which weren't very helpful.

Slowly, carefully, he got to his feet. The bed didn't make a sound as it decompressed, and the floor, weirdly, did not creak. Nothing much happened as he shifted his weight, and he darted a nervous tongue against his lips and cast quick glances at Claire. Nothing. Not so much as a twitch.

_Okay_, he strove to keep his mental voice calm. _Okay. No panicking. Easy does it. Just slide across the floor, that's it, pay no attention to the terrifying blonde child with the voice of doom sitting by the wall—_

"Sam."

Voice of Doom. There it was.

Shit.

"What?" he croaked, a little wildly, and the girl half-turned and gave him a _look_. He didn't know what the look was meant to indicate. It wasn't the sort of thing he was used to seeing on the faces of tiny teenagers. It wasn't so much "Oh my _gawd_ what is your _issue?_" as it was "Your strange movements and bizarre human behaviors make me question your mental cohesion." Which was a strange collection of concepts to associate with a child and which Sam wanted to dismiss as a translation out-of-hand.

He really really did. The problem was that it seemed to fit.

But she was clearly human. As was he.

"You, uh," he tried, and licked his lips. The girl went on staring. "You know me."

"I told you, explanations would be best left for later." She paused. "Eat your apple."

"I ate my apple!" he flared, waving the core around a little wildly. "I'm going stir-crazy here!"

She paused. Blinked at him.

"Do you want another apple?"

"Do I—does it _look_ like I—okay, seriously? This? Enough. Just, _enough_. I'm done sitting her like a lump on a shitty bed in a crap motel with the doomsday child and roaches and rats and mold while my girlfriend is being God-knows-what by a couple of crazy rejects from some really awful movie involving lots of guns and macho throwdowns and-and shit! All right? Are you hearing me? I am _done_, I am _finished_, I swear to God I am _leaving _right now and if you're going to stop me then go ahead, but the only thing that'll keep me from Jess is going to be you putting a few new holes through my skull so you'd better get to whatever crazy mojo you have up your sleeve and just put me out of my misery or I will walk through that door in the next five seconds _so help me God!_" He finished on a kind of ragged wail and gasped for breath, while the girl turned completely in her chair to regard him with nothing so much as a twitch of an eyebrow to indicate her response to his tirade. Sam panted a little, and when no action from the girl seemed forthcoming, flung himself at the door and reached for it with both hands.

"Sam."

He ignored the claws-on-the-chalkboard sensation of every hair on his body trying to stand on end at the tone, and grit his teeth. He was going. He was leaving right now. Here he was, Samuel freakin' Winchester, walking out the goddamned door and into the rest of his life.

Only his escape was decisively interrupted when the door burst open and a more than slightly wild-eyed Dean slammed into the room, preceded by his voice which managed to both growl and shout simultaneously.

"Cas! _Cas!_ Grab the gear, whatever you can carry. They've got Jimmy. _They've got Jimmy! _ They know where we are, we gotta move _now_, come on!"

Sam resisted the urge to quail when furious green eyes fell on him, and he barely registered his own bizarre attempt to scramble backward across the room (even though he wasn't scared of the guy. Totally. Wasn't.) even as Dean surged forward and latched onto Sam's upper arm with iron-strong fingers.

"You're comin' too, princess," he ground out, and Sam most definitely did _not_ yelp. He _did_ struggle, unsuccessfully, to yank free of the vice clamped on his arm, gritting his teeth in a manful way, however.

"Hey!" Dean gave him a little shake and waved something metallic and solid in his face. "You know how to use this?"

Sam stared in horror as he realized the older man was holding a _handgun _inches from his nose—a sleek and ugly machine designed for the sole purpose of killing people. He swallowed hard and shook his head vigorously.

_What the hell. What the _hell.

"Typical," Dean muttered, "Still makin' my life difficult."

_Still?_

Dean shoved the weapon into the waistband of his pants and grabbed up a nearby duffle, which clanked.

"Congratulations. You've been demoted to pack mule."

Sam bristled as the heavy bag was shoved unceremoniously into his arms, but his snide comeback was trampled equally unceremoniously by the girl (had Dean called her _Cas?_ Then who was the dark haired man?) striding quickly to the door hauling a backpack over one slender shoulder.

"I'm ready," she declared, eyes fierce, without any sign of distress over Dean's obvious anxiety. "Let's go."

Sam blinked at the pair of them, but had no time to do more as he was hustled quickly out the door, clutching the bag to his chest. As he passed the threshold, a glimpse of red caught his eye: the bag of apples, lying forgotten in a corner.

"Shit," Dean was snarling to himself as Sam hurried to catch up to him and…Cas. "Shit shit _shit_." And Sam blinked at the fervor in the man's voice, the fury and the crackling edge of something like…fear? Was Dean afraid? Of Gordon? Or…for his friend?

"This is pretty bad, Dean," the girl observed. Dean's hands twitched, as if considering making fists.

"What exactly happened, Dean?"

"Not now, Cas! We have to go…up, I guess."

_Up?_

"There." Dean waved a hand at the side of the building they'd recently vacated and Sam took a moment to note that it seemed to be some sort of converted hotel, now a tumbledown apartment building in a neighborhood that had clearly seen better days, like most of the neighborhoods in St. Sebastian.

The girl darted ahead toward a conveniently situated dumpster and clambered up with surprising dexterity. Sam didn't gape, but it was a very near thing.

"_Go,_ already, Jesus!" Dean grabbed his arm and shoved him, half-stumbling, in the wake of the girl and he fetched up, wincing, against the dumpster. The girl peered down at him, and shook her head minutely. Dean scrambled onto the dumpster and hoisted the girl up to grasp the bottom rung of a fire escape, and Sam realized, suddenly, that they were both focused completely and totally on climbing and no one was paying him the slightest attention.

He didn't drop the bag. He didn't stop to think.

He just ran.

* * *

_Note: I really am just writing this to amuse myself, and to give myself something to do when I'm not actively trying to work on anything I care about. Which is why I'm not keeping to a schedule and why I haven't just written the whole thing all in one go. And is also the reason for the various typos and grammar issues I normally would take the time to weed out. Just FYI._


	6. Chapter 6

**Warning!** This chapter contains blood and violence. This is really pretty violent. And not very funny. Whoops! (There is seriously a lot of blood. I was a little shocked myself.)

* * *

**Every Snowflake… 6/?**

"It's worse than that," Dean said curtly, as Cas scrambled quickly up the ladder toward the roof. "A lot worse. It wasn't Gordon and his very special friend."

"Other hunters? Reinforcements?"

Dean hoisted himself up over the lip of the roof with a grunt.

"Didn't get a good look. Could be hunters, could be worse."

"Let's hope that's not the case. Why did Jimmy stay behind?"

"To distract them. Wanted me to find you, and Claire. Keep you guys safe. And to keep an eye on—" He half-turned to glance back at the lip of the roof and froze, briefly, muscles in his shoulders tensing and a growl making it past suddenly clenched teeth.

"Son of a _bitch,_" he ground out, quietly. Cas' eyes flicked from his face to the empty space behind him.

"Go," she said. "I'll look after Claire."

"Jimmy'll kill us both if anything happens to—"

"Go. We'll be fine. Sam won't."

Dean dithered. Just for a moment. It wasn't that Castiel wasn't the most equipped, out of all of them, to deal with any potential threat that could arise. It wasn't as if she couldn't blend in more readily than Dean could ever hope to, or teleport, or, if really absolutely necessary, deliver a truly righteous smacking to whoever might dare to threaten her host. The problem was that Dean _wanted _ to chase after Sam, _needed_ to with the entirety of his being, and he was fighting that aspect of himself as hard as he could. Which spelled about fifteen seconds of hesitation on his part, which was some kind of record for any Dean to wait before haring off to rescue his wayward "brother."

"Be safe, Dean," Castiel murmured as he scrambled back over the edge of the building, but if he heard her words, he didn't respond.

A moment later, the rooftop was empty.

* * *

Sam knew the city as well as any of the natives, almost as if he'd lived here his entire life. Sometimes he felt as if he'd committed the whole layout of the residential section of the orbiting platform to memory at some point, because he often found himself in areas he'd never visited yet, on some level, recognized and understood fundamentally in relation to the larger city blueprints.

It was one of those things he tried not to examine too closely.

Now he was huddled under an overpass blocks away from his own neighborhood, clutching the stolen bag and fighting to catch his breath. He wasn't really out of shape, he didn't think, but running full-pelt away from kidnappers and possibly toward unknown danger and a missing girlfriend was not the sort of thing he'd ever trained for, and now his feet hurt, his legs twinged, and his lungs struggled to drag breath into his body. His fingers clenched and unclenched spasmodically on the bag and it was only after several long minutes that he felt comfortable enough to relax his grip and raise his eyes to the artificial river, flowing languidly beneath the cloudless blue sky.

He sucked another few breaths through his nose and mouth and looked down at the bag in his arms. It was heavy, disturbingly so, and whenever he jostled it even slightly it made a distinctly metallic noise that Sam felt boded no good for anybody. Kidnappers. Crazy kidnappers who beat people up in alleys and invaded people's homes and fought other…other crazy kidnappers and apparently harbored at least one genuinely mentally ill person, if his guesses about Claire-slash-"Cas" were anywhere near to being correct. Oh God. And now he was sitting here with a bag full of their unexpectedly solid, decidedly metallic heavy objects that could _not _be left behind even as they abandoned a room with food and clothes and computer parts and whatever other personal effects they presumably had stashed around the place.

The bag was full of weapons.

He didn't even need to open it to know that was the case.

He didn't need to.

But he opened it anyway.

* * *

Dean ran.

He wasn't really designed for it. Not the way Sam was, all long legs and lean body. Dean was meant for close-quarter combat, and it showed in his genetic makeup: broad in the shoulders, strong and solid and quick. Running was not his favorite pastime.

Which isn't to say he wasn't good at it. He was pretty good at it. Even in the second-hand boots that fit wrong he ate up the distance between himself and Sam rapidly. It helped that Sam had stopped moving.

Sam had a head start. If he'd kept moving, if he'd headed for the 'dock, hitched a ride on a transport off of St. Sebastian to some other, even more backwater orbital platform, Dean might have lost him. The chances were good, actually, and Dean had a sudden image of himself standing at the 'docks, staring up at the orbital elevators in despair, too late, too late.

But Sam didn't go to the 'dock. It probably didn't even occur to him that he should. He probably didn't even realize that Dean knew exactly where he was, in relation to his own person, didn't know that Dean could track his psychic signal pretty much anywhere he happened to roam while he remained on the platform. It was disturbing to imagine a Sam who didn't know something like that, something so fundamental, so basic, to the nature of his own existence, but…it would make Dean's job a hell of a lot easier. (And it _was_ his job. Would continue to be his job.)

Unfortunately, Dean didn't have a clear idea of the layout of the city, and suddenly he found himself wishing Cas _had_ downloaded the entire map to his brain. It would have let him avoid running up against dead ends, blind alleys, unexpected waterways and branching tunnels that slowed his progress and left him sweaty, swearing and increasingly agitated.

The longer Sam stayed in one place, the more likely he was to get into trouble.

Despite his own sense of urgency, Dean started praying for Sam to _get moving._

The fact that Sam probably couldn't even hear him only added to the surreality of the situation.

* * *

The fact that his hands were actually shaking was not the main reason he'd been distracted. The shaking hands thing was mostly a side-effect of the sense of hollow near-nausea that had blossomed in his gut and left him once again struggling to draw breath, glad he was sitting down because if he hadn't been then his legs would certainly have given out and dumped him unceremoniously into the mud and gravel and dirt beside the river.

He couldn't catch his breath. The world wasn't under him at all—he was hanging in space, adrenaline and fear thrilling along his skin, up his arms and through his fingers, running down his back and shivering over his ribcage.

…_the one that got away…_

…_still makin' my life difficult…_

…_you're not asleep, are ya, sam?..._

…_open them baby blues…_

…_sam…_

_Sam_

_Sammy?_

"Saaaammmmyyyyy."

He bit his lip, and looked up.

He wasn't alone.

He dropped what he was holding.

* * *

Dean was getting closer. He could smell water, hear the noise of boats on the river.

The river.

He pushed himself to go faster.

* * *

"Hi Sam!" chirped a cheerful pretty face under a little pixie haircut, and Sam stared at the girl, at the hand waving perkily at him, at her cocked hip and little smirk. At the two big bruisers standing just behind her, not so much smirking as looming, in a distinctly menacing way.

"Uh," he said intelligently.

"This is a real find!" the girl enthused, "It must be my lucky day!"

Her goons did not seem to share her chirpy disposition, as they continued to glower and loom menacingly, and Sam suspected one or both of them was moments away from cracking his knuckles pointedly.

"I mean," the little blonde thing went on, sashaying up the incline toward Sam with a mad little grin, "We knew about the others being in town—it's why we're here to begin with. When you get word of an actual _escape_ from the blue city, well, you drop whatever the hell you happen to be doing and hightail it to the drop site. And it was such a _dramatic_ escape, too. Heh."

She drew a little closer.

"And then there's _you_. Little Sammy-Sam, all growed up and by his lonesome. And you're looking _real_ lonesome there, Sam-my-boy."

"Stop," someone said, and Sam realized with surprise that it was him.

She raised her eyebrows.

"Stop what?"

"Stop—saying my name." _Leave me alone. Go away._

_Who are you?_

_Why is this happening?_

_Oh, God._

She smiled like a shark.

"Well, you're just precious." She stepped closer, leaned down, hands on her hips like a teacher dealing with an adorably precocious two-year-old. "That's not really your name, you know." Her smile broadened. "You don't _have one._"

She never got farther than another step in his direction. There was a noise, a quiet little _shk!_ as if someone had cast a fishing line, and the girl's eyes widened almost comically. Almost, because at that moment her hands flew to her throat and a fine red line appeared in the skin, and Sam was bathed in a delicate spray of blood.

The girl flew upward, legs kicking wildly, still clawing at her throat. Sam gaped wordlessly after her, too stunned and horrified to do more. Someone had grabbed her neck in a noose, someone had actually winched her up toward the ceiling of the underpass…

_Fishing line, fishing line,_ his brain gabbled at him. _Invisible wire! Invisible—_

And a figure dropped between Sam and the goons, and there was more blood.

Sam had seen movies, of course. He had, he thought, a pretty good grasp of how a fight scene was meant to go. There might be taunts, a certain amount of chatter between the combatants before they squared off. There were usually a certain amount of kicks to the head, maybe some punches, some locks, some holds. Some joints being bent the wrong way. There tended, he knew, to be a degree of distance between the individuals locked in combat, as if they were engaged in something more like a dance than a fight. Blocks often nearly preceded attacks. Fighters magically knew where their fists and elbows and feet and heads needed to be.

This wasn't like that. Dean dropped on the two heavy men with a firearm in one hand and a six-inch serrated blade in the other. He fired twice—at the knees of all things—and the men snarled and staggered on their suddenly shattered joints.

Sam scrambled backward up the muddy incline as Dean, bizarrely, dropped his gun and surged forward, knife in hand. He plowed into one of the goons and bore him to the ground and shoved the full length of the knife into the side of the man's neck. Blood sprayed everywhere. _Everywhere._ Sam slammed a hand over his mouth as Dean wrenched the knife backward, tearing a huge ragged hole through tendons and arteries and muscle.

There wasn't time to do more. The other man attacked without a sound, aiming a vicious kick at Dean's head, sending him tumbling away. The man he'd cut remained on the ground, grasping at his neck, at the fountaining blood, but neither his buddy nor Dean spared him the slightest glance. Dean was staggering to his feet, shaking his head, a fresh cut opened above his ear. His eyes widened slightly as the other man slammed into him, leading with his fists.

It looked like a brawl. The two men whaled away at each other, until Dean managed to grab hold of the other man's longer hair and introduce his face to Dean's knee. Sam winced as the man's nose spattered across his face, as Dean slammed him again and again, pulping the flesh, breaking his teeth. The other man clawed at Dean's leg, tried to grasp it, to bear him to the ground, but Dean had the knife.

The goon was muscle.

Dean, Sam realized, wasn't muscle at all.

He was a killer.

Dean hit the ground hard. It didn't matter. The other man surged forward, fist raised clumsily, face dripping blood, and he never had a chance. Not a moment of a chance. Sam knew this, saw the arc of the knife, winced before it even struck, slamming into the side of the man's throat, the soft flesh and tendons severing under the elegant horror of a piece of sharpened metal.

The man coughed, spilling blood down his chin. It spattered on his shirt, on Dean's face, and the knife wrenched out and slammed home again, and again, and Dean did something with his legs and forcibly rolled them both over and grabbed the man's hair and was prepared for another vicious stab when the man's body bucked once, violently, and dropped back hard on the earth.

Dead.

Or…

Suddenly Dean was surging to his feet and lunging for Sam. Sam flinched. Couldn't be blamed for flinching, or for shoving himself backward over the earth, or for babbling a refrain on the variation of "Nonononono get away get _away_." But Dean wasn't deterred, simply dropped the gore-covered knife to the ground and kept coming and at the last minute, as Sam was seriously considering his chances against the blood-covered, insane man, threw himself bodily on top of Sam and forced his head to the ground, blanketing his body with as much of Dean's own as possible.

Behind them, a noise like the screaming of monsters concussed the air, slapped them both hard against the rocky ground, squeezed Sam's muscles until he thought they would burst. The noise went on, and on, and Sam dug his fingers into the earth and couldn't breathe, and couldn't see, and all he could feel was the weight of the older man on his back and the slickness of blood and the mud and the stones under his skin and oh God, what was going on, what had happened to his life, it was wrong, it was all wrong and he was going to die, to die, to _die…._

And then it stopped. Silence slammed back into the world, so sudden and huge Sam nearly gasped, and was glad he didn't because he would have inhaled a lungful of dirt. Dean shifted, rolled off him, and planted a heavy boot in his ribs.

"Up, Sammy. Get the hell up. We gotta move."

That was, he would reflect later, pretty much the definition of "last straw."

There was a gun in the bag, the duffle Sam had opened against his better judgment. It was on the very top, next to the photo viewer he'd been clutching when the scary blonde chick with the shark smile had surprised him into dropping it. He reached out, now, for the gun and the viewer, and raised the former to point at the blood-covered man's chest.

Slowly, Dean raised his hands. They were red.

"Gonna shoot me, Sammy?"

Sam swallowed, hard. His hands weren't trembling, anymore, and he wasn't sure what to think about that fact. He tried not to. Instead he raised the viewer, holding it out so the screen was clearly visible, so that there was no mistaking the image it was currently displaying.

The picture of Sam, and Dean, together. Laughing. Waving. Sam leaning heavily on the other man, as if they'd known each other all their lives.

"_Who are you?_" He demanded, and was amazed at how quiet, how calm, his voice was. Swallowed against the shiver that tried to run up and down his spine. "What the _hell_ is going on?"

Dean narrowed his eyes. He looked hard at Sam's face, at the image on the viewer, at the gun in Sam's hand. Blood was running from the cut on his head and Sam tried to ignore the way he swayed, a little, the way his skin had gone pale. The way he swallowed before opening his mouth.

"I'm your brother," Dean said, and then paused. "Sort of."

* * *

Tbc…

* * *

_Okay, so I love me some badass!Dean. So sue me._

_Next chapter, less violence. Probably._


	7. Chapter 7

_In case anyone gets an idea otherwise, this is _gen_. Absolutely. And will remain so._

_Also, long explanation is loooooong. Holy crap.  
_

_

* * *

_

**Every Snowflake… 7/?**

Sam was pretty sure this wasn't actually happening.

He wasn't standing under a highway overpass with a gun in his hand, pointed at a man covered in blood and claiming to be his brother, while two corpses cooled rapidly nearby and a third, presumably, dangled from the concrete ceiling above.

Those sorts of things just didn't happen in real life.

Sam didn't have a brother.

"I don't have a brother," he said tightly, through his teeth. Dean still had his hands in the air and a rivulet of blood ran down the edge of his right hand and disappeared into his sleeve. The older man swallowed again, growing paler as Sam watched, blinking rapidly. His head was still bleeding.

These sorts of things didn't happen to people. They didn't _happen._

"Go away and leave me alone." He tried for authoritative. He had the gun, after all. Dean blinked heavily at him, and licked his lips. His words, when he spoke, were quiet.

"It's my fault," Dean said, "I know. It is. I—I'm sorry."

Slowly, Sam lowered the viewer, hand hovering uncertainly near his hip. Then he tossed it away and renewed his grip on the heavy semiautomatic pistol, this time with both hands. He approached the other man slowly, sighting carefully along the barrel.

He knew how to fire it. How to hit wherever he aimed. He could put a bullet between Dean's eyes if he had to. But Sam had never held a gun in his life.

His breath came slow, and steady. He thought he should be panicking, hyperventilating even. But he could feel, as if from a distance, the calm in his body, blossoming out from some cool, composed center he wasn't even aware he possessed. His hands were steady, his mind was still.

Everything seemed so far away.

"Who are you?" he asked again, this time nearly whispering, standing close enough that he could see the way Dean's eyes had widened and lost their focus. See the way he was swaying, ever so slightly. Bizarrely, Sam was struck by the sudden urge to reach out, grasp the other man's shoulder. Steady him.

Instead he clenched his teeth slightly. Some of the things happening—some of them were real. The sweat under his arms, and rolling down his back. The dirt on his palms and face. The dryness in his mouth—these things were real. They belonged to Sam Winchester, the student, the boyfriend, the young man with his whole future ahead of him. The other things—the weight of the gun and the man covered in blood and the strange urge to _help him_—these things weren't his. They were far away, distant. He was watching these things from behind a pane of glass.

"You know who I am," Dean was saying, still softly, voice thickened with blood-loss and probably pain. "You have to. _Sammy_. Please. I didn't—we didn't _know_, man, we had no idea."

"Didn't know what?" he demanded sharply.

"Know you were here. We weren't looking for you. We just wanted…to get away. Away. That's all."

Dean blinked again, slowly, and made what seemed an unconscious gesture toward his face, as if he meant to wipe his eyes. He swallowed again.

"Hey," Sam said, gun wavering, eyeing the other man warily, "Hey. You better not puke."

"Not gonna _puke_, Jesus." He pressed his lips together. "You, uh—you got a towel, or something? I could just—" he waggled his fingers toward the still-bleeding wound in his head, but lost whatever he'd meant to say when his eyes rolled up and his knees buckled.

"Shit!" Sam blurted, dropping the gun instinctively and lunging for the older man. Dean full weight hit him like a sack of wet cement, slippery with blood. Sam cursed and struggled to grab his jacket and keep him from slipping and hitting the ground, finally dropping to his own knees and nearly cradling the other man's body as his head lolled senselessly.

When he realized what he was doing, Sam nearly let go.

But he didn't.

"Dean, shit, what the hell am I—I can't stay here. We can't—" he should leave. The smart thing to do would be to leave. This morning he'd been with his girlfriend, in their home. They had breakfast together. Sam had orange juice.

Dean's eyelids fluttered, and Sam took a moment to reflect that he hadn't actually thought that sort of thing happened in real life.

Real life. Right.

"'M okay. Geddoff. What th'…"

Sam wasn't surprised that Dean was slurring, or that his eyes wandered when he finally managed to pry them open. From somewhere came an urge to continue holding on, keep the older man from pulling away, keep him immobilized until Sam could get the wound cleaned out, get it bandaged. Get them both cleaned up.

But Sam wasn't responsible for Dean's well-being. He _wasn't._ Why did he keep feeling as though he was?

Jesus.

"Lemme up, Sam."

He was still holding on.

He released the man with what was most definitely _not_ a yelp, and scrambled backward, almost crab-walking, toward the dropped pistol. Dean made no move in his direction, just sat blearily slumped on the ground, one hand pressed to his wounded head, the other wavering up to push over his face.

"Okay," he murmured thickly. "Christ. Okay. If you're gonna shoot me get it the hell over with, because otherwise we got things we need to do."

Sam's chest rose and fell sharply, once, twice—all the panic he hadn't had earlier while gripping the gun suddenly making itself known at the sight of the man claiming to be his brother clearly struggling to remain conscious. Sam didn't want to know where the fear came from. Why it skittered under his skin, why he fought against shivers and an urge to reach out. To fix things, somehow. Try to make it better.

Dean looked up at him, face smeared in red, drawn and tired and distant-eyed. Sam swallowed hard.

He lowered the gun.

* * *

Answers. That's what he was after.

That was why he'd followed Dean's instructions to tip the bodies of the two men into the river.

Why he'd done his best to get them both cleaned up, why he'd slung Dean's arm over his shoulder and helped him stagger up the bank, hotwired a little two-person transport, and with a little finagling managed to get them stashed in a motel better suited to certain types of excessively underdressed ladies (and gentlemen) and their very discriminating counterparts.

There was, of course, the little problem of the third body, the blonde girl who'd apparently _freaking disappeared_ at some point while both Sam and Dean were distracted with their own…circumstances. Sam considered this to be something of a problem, but it was one he hadn't shared with Dean yet.

So he wasn't any closer to finding Jess at this point. He had at least two different sets of people out for a chunk of his flesh (he was pretty sure, anyway, that both Blondie and Gordon were gunning for him in a not-at-all nice way). He was sitting in a shit room with a bag of weapons on the floor and a stolen car parked not too far away (though far enough, he hoped, not to set the police on them if it happened to be discovered) and Dean was propped up on the room's single bed with a bag of ice clapped to the side of his head, eyes shut and grimacing.

"Christ," he said at one point, to no one in particular. His voice had a thin, distant quality that in anyone else Sam would've taken as a bad sign, but in this case was hoping would work to his advantage. He dragged the room's single chair from over by the window and spun it so he could sit with his arms folded, resting on the back. Dean peeked at him from one eye, briefly, before shutting it again with a quiet groan.

"'M injured over here man, c'mon…"

"You'll live," Sam ground out, a little surprised by the callousness of his own voice. A little. But although Dean was less blood-covered than he'd been half an hour previously, and his head was bandaged, and lying on the bed he seemed less threatening and more defenseless than he had since Sam had met the man, none of it meant anything at all. Sam had collected both guns and the bloody knife Dean had dropped before fleeing the…the scene, really….and though they were all stashed in the weapons bag near the door, and currently bloodless, Sam was fully aware of their presence. He'd cleaned the knife himself, fighting his gag reflex the entire time.

"You killed those people," he said. His voice didn't tremble. That was something.

"They would've done the same to you, Sam. Worse." Dean's mouth barely moved as he spoke; the words were faint, riding on his exhale, tumbling into the room like dry leaves. "Not people an'way."

" 'Not people'," Sam repeated. "Jesus. They bled. They just—blood was _everywhere._ I never—I've never—"

_Never had someone's blood on me. Oh God._

"Jus' calm down. Settle. 'll be all right. Okay? Jesus." Dean squinted his eyes tighter, for a moment, and his face paled. A moment later his hand dropped and his features went slack, and Sam blew air out through his nose.

Okay. Interrogation would have to wait.

But not forever.

* * *

When Dean finally opened his eyes again, Sam was leaning against the door with his arms crossed and his lips pressed tightly together. Dean took one look at him and groaned a little groan, and Sam was across the room in an instant, looming over him, barely resisting the urge to grab the man by his hair and shake him.

"You _killed _those men."

Dean stared up at him, face surprisingly calm for someone in his position. He went on staring until Sam backed off, resettling himself on the chair, this time turned around so he could scoot himself closer to the bed, hands on his knees, in a weird parody of attending a sickbed.

"You _killed them,_" he whispered.

Dean licked his lips. Opened and shut his eyes, briefly, then very softly said, "I saved your ass."

"Did you—why did you have to _kill_ them?"

Dean opened his eyes. "Ever see a zombie movie?"

"Ever—what? What are you—"

"Zombies. Shoot 'em, stab 'em, do whatever, they just keep coming. Can't be killed, can't be _stopped_, not unless you take the whole head clean off."

"Are you saying—those people weren't zombies! Jesus Christ!"

"No, they're worse. 'Cause zombies're dumb. Those guys? They weren't zombies and they sure as hell weren't _people_, by the time I got there. Probably hadn't been for a while. And they're not dumb, either."

Sam ground his teeth.

"And that makes it _okay?_ And you—you kidnapped me and, and you beat up those guys in my house and those guys in the alley—every time I see you you're hurting someone! And you want me to think you're my—my brother? My _brother_? I don't have a—"

"Sam." Dean struggled to push himself up the headboard.

"Don't have a brother, have _any_ family, I came here to get a fresh start because my Dad died and I'm, I'm going to school, I can't—I can't _do _this, this crazy dead-people and kidnapping and lost-family-members shit, I can't I—"

"Sam. Sam! Jesus Christ, Sam, shut the hell up, you're giving me a headache!"

"No, I think it was _being kicked in the head_ that's giving you a headache!"

"You know something, you can get down off your high horse right the hell now. I've saved your ass twice in the last sixteen hours and this is the thanks I get? You got a real gratitude problem there, pal."

"You left Jess behind."

"I left Jimmy behind too. They'll torture him. You know that? They will _torture him._ Gordon's not gonna lay a finger on your pretty little girlfriend, but Jimmy's being cut into ribbons right now. So get off my back. Jesus."

Sam rocked back in the chair, blinking, shocked into silence. He thought of the dark-haired man he'd seen in the apartment, slender next to Dean's bulk. Smaller. Suddenly couldn't shake the image of blood on his face, on his hands. Tried not to imagine the sound of his screams.

"They wanted to do the same to you," Dean told him softly. "They'll cut you apart if they get you. Those men? That girl? Ten times more dangerous than Gordon. And the bodies I hacked up may be dead, but the intelligence that was inside—those are still very much alive."

Sam looked up sharply. "What do you mean, 'intelligence?'"

Dean groaned aloud, shutting his eyes briefly and pawing at his forehead. He shuffled a hand around on the bedcover and Sam, without really looking, pushed the nearly-melted ice-pack into his grasp. Dean plunked it back on the side of his head and cracked an eye to regard Sam.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. I can't, uh—I can't really explain what's happened today unless I give you some information you're not actually allowed to have. Info _nobody_ is really allowed to have. So what I'm telling you—it's super-secret. I mean if it got out, it would probably cause mass panic, riots, God knows how many deaths. All right? So you keep this under your hat."

Sam pressed his lips together tightly. Nodded.

"Okay, so. I guess…when you go outside, right? When you go outside at night, look up at the sky. What do you see?"

"Um…" Sam shrugged. "The…dome? The sky? The stars? Other platforms? The moon?"

"Yeah, okay. Those are the things you can see. Now. What are the things that you _don't_ see?"

"I don't—"

"I mean, knowing what you know about technology, about society, about people. What would you _expect _to see in the sky, that isn't there?"

Sam slowly shook his head, perplexed. Dean nodded. It seemed he'd expected as much.

"_Traffic_, Sam. Traffic. Not just the orbital elevators, or shuttles, people schlepping back and forth between platforms, Earth, the moon. I mean traffic beyond the Earth's gravity well, traffic to other planets. You never see anything like that, do you? Or hear about it on the news? No shuttles to Mars, no new explorations of Jupiter or flybys past Saturn or Neptune or whatever? When's the last time a craft was launched to the edge of the solar system? Your lifetime? Before that?"

"I…" Sam bit his lip. "What are you saying?"

Dean settled himself more comfortably on the bed. "No one really thinks about it because to most people, it's not that important. Colonies on Mars. Who cares, right? If we were going to do it, we'd've done it by now, yeah?"

"I…yeah, I guess?"

Dean made a face. "You guess. Right. Well the thing is—we _have_ the technology. We can build fully functioning biosphere platforms in space. _In space._ We could go to Mars if we wanted. We could probably terraform it, if we really tried. The thing is though…putting people there. That's the problem. It takes a long damn time to get to Mars, and the human body isn't designed to survive that kind of trip. Not well. A year in space would see all sorts of damage to a living human. And forget about settling on the moons of Saturn, or one of the other gas giants. Can't be done. Not without some kind of advanced party. Some sort of scouts. Something non-organic, to be sent ahead, to fix things up nice. Clear the land, hang up curtains, whatever."

"Advance…scouts?" Sam knew he wasn't stupid. But he was having a hard time following the apparent jumps in Dean's monologue, and no idea how it connected to the situation he found himself embroiled in.

"Look." Dean gestured with his free hand. "It's simple, okay? About forty-five years ago, an international venture to colonize the solar system began. They knew it would be impossible to send people, organic humans, to the far reaches of the solar system, or even to a relatively hospitable planet like Mars. That would be too damn risky, not to mention labor intensive and expensive. What they needed was a non-organic means to blaze a trail. Make these places hospitable. They needed machines that could do the work, that could survive and function in places of extreme gravity, heat, cold, whatever. So they made them.

"They're basically nanobots. Trillions and trillions of nanobots. They're self-replicating and in sufficient numbers—a couple billion—they become intelligent. These intelligences are clouds of super-resilient machines that can't be destroyed by fire, by cold, or by gravity. And they were sent out into the solar system to colonize it for the human race."

There was a long silence. Dean let his eyes slide shut for a moment, mouth tight with pain. Sam stared at him wordlessly, then lifted his eyes to the far wall.

"Oh," he said eventually. Dean shifted, drew a breath, opened his eyes again.

"So okay. Uncounted numbers of clouds of machines intelligences, launched into space. And they did what they were supposed to do. They colonized. They did it very well. They were designed for it. But they got…I dunno, at some point they got sick of taking orders, maybe. They're intelligent, they're physically superior in every way to humans, they're not bounded by little things like organic needs since they can basically subsist on sunlight and atmosphere and solid rock…and they got to thinking, 'Baby, we could own this town.'"

"This…you mean the—the _solar system_."

Dean pointed a finger and grinned tiredly. "Yahtzee."

"So wait, let me get this straight—evil machines bent on dominating the solar system have rebelled against their human masters and…what, are bent on enslaving the Earth and its human population?"

Dean grinned a little, gaze flicking up to the water-stained ceiling. "Something like that. Except, instead of 'enslave,' read 'exterminate.' Yeah. There's a war going on. Has been for years. Decades. The moon is basically the front line. Earth and the platforms—that's it. We're it. The entire solar system is controlled by machine intelligences. All we have is the Earth. We're barely keeping them at bay. Any day could be the day when they finally manage to snuff us out."

Sam pressed his lips together. He had a sudden horrifying image in his mind of the entire solar system, laid out like one of the science projects grade-schoolers made, engulfed in darkness. A huge cloud of roiling black, cold and brilliant and utterly without mercy. And the Earth like a candle, tiny and fragile. Naked and unprotected.

"So those men…the ones you…"

"Yeah. The…clouds, um. Did you ever see _The Exorcist?_ Or, I dunno, some show where like a demon gets inside somebody, makes 'em do things they wouldn't normally? Like they're puppets, or like, suits?"

"Like, people-suits?"

"Meatsuits. Yeah. Like that. The…well, they're like demons. They get inside people and walk around in their bodies. And they can keep the body going even if you shoot it or stick a chunk of metal in its heart. But it's damn hard to be convincing as a person if your head is detached from your neck, or gushing blood, or whatever. I can't kill them. I didn't kill the thing inside. But I made the body so inhospitable they had to leave. Abandon them. That's what that noise was. The uh, the demons. Leaving the body."

Sam said, "Holy shit."

"Yeah."

Sam scowled. He folded his arms tightly across his chest. Forget the whole 'spattered in blood, long-lost brother' thing. That was mundane. Totally believable. Completely sane. Normal even. The solar system being overrun by intelligent clouds of microscopic machines? That was just a bad science fiction movie waiting to happen.

And wait. Something about the story didn't make sense. If the…the nanobots, the clouds, the…whatever, were essentially unstoppable…if the war had continued for decades….Why did the Earth still have a human population? Why were they even sitting in this room, having this conversation?

"Hang on, wait a minute. You said…'any day.' Any day they could snuff us out. But…they haven't. Right? They haven't done it yet. Why? What's holding them back?"

And here Dean grinned huge and genuine, the exhaustion falling briefly from his features.

"We are. Or, well, _we're_ not. But the other ones, the ones like us. Like you, like me, like Jimmy and Claire. That's what we're for. It's what we do. We're the first, last, and only real defense the Earth has. Without us, the whole thing goes kablooey."

He paused, and his grin faded. Added, "Except, you know. We all ran away."

* * *

Tbc…

* * *

_Notes: I pretty much write these in two days and don't really edit them or anything. I was tired today so there are probably some things in this chapter I could've done better re: emotion and revelations and stuff. I'll try to get whatever I missed in the next chapter. _

_Also I did not mean for this to be so long. Sheesh._


	8. Chapter 8

_Look, a chapter!_

* * *

**Every Snowflake….. 8/?**

"_Winchester?_" Dean was saying, face contorted with insufferable glee.

"It's a _name,_" Sam retorted irritably, resisting the urge to reach out and smack the obnoxious bastard upside his head. "Jackass," he added, for good measure.

"Oh it's a _name_, all right," Dean returned. "Not really _subtle_, though, is it? Not so much about flyin' under the radar there, huh Sammy?"

"Stop calling me that! It's _Sam,_ okay? And lotsa people've had the name—not just, y'know, the guy who made the gun, or whatever. "

"I think it's a rifle, actually," the older man mused, adding after a brief pause, "_Sam,"_ in a long drawl that scraped on Sam's nerves like a file being dragged along his spine. He bristled.

"You're so freakin' annoying! I should've left you behind!"

"Good luck trying," Dean retorted cheerfully, but he didn't elaborate. Sam scowled down at the street. Way down. They were currently perched about two stories up, sitting on the roof of a building Sam had previously only seen from the ground. He found he preferred it from that angle. But Dean had insisted.

"Nobody really looks _up_, Sam," Dean had informed him with, he thought, an unnecessarily hard whack to the shoulder. "It's a cliché, sure, but it's also true. Human nature. Don't ask me why, but it's pretty universal, unless you get it trained outta you. Or programmed out."

Sam was trying not to think too hard about what 'programmed' meant in this context.

"_We're the first, last, and only real defense the Earth has." _

Dean had made that announcement with disturbing calm. After which he'd pretty much failed to go into any further detail, waving away Sam's questions and swinging himself unsteadily to his feet.

"_We heal fast,"_ he'd said, which wasn't really much of an explanation at all in Sam's book. _"I'll be fine in another couple hours."_

Sam was pretty sure that the 'only real defense' and 'we heal fast' things were connected.

He just wasn't sure how. Wasn't all that sure he wanted to know, except that for some _insane_ reason he, Sam Winchester (whose name was perfectly normal and not at all showy, thank-you-very-much), was caught up in something that was really too damn big and complicated to fully comprehend. That, among other things, had involved his girlfriend being kidnapped. And Sam wasn't really trusting Dean's reassurances that she'd be "just fine." He'd allowed himself to be sidetracked thus far, mostly due to being kidnapped himself, and attacked, and spattered in blood, and latched onto by a man whose capacity for violence Sam suspected had yet to be fully plumbed.

But Sam was nothing if not determined, once he'd attached himself to an idea, and since he'd woken up in the shitty little motel room surrounded by strangers one thought had continued to burn like a small but insistent pilot light in the back of his mind_. Jess, save Jess find Jess get Jess Jess __Jess._ He was sorry about Jimmy. He actually was. But Jimmy wasn't his responsibility. Jess was.

He really didn't know what to make of the fact that Dean seemed to have decided Jess was somehow _his _responsibility as well, apparently by simple virtue of the fact that he now seemed determined not to let Sam out of his sight again.

So now here they were, perched across the street from the run-down little two-story that Sam and Jess had called home for the past seventeen-and-a-half months. They were coming up on an anniversary, for God's sake. He and Dean had been perched in place for about an hour, and Sam was starting to feel a little restless.

"Come on, man," he tried, and hoped he didn't sound nearly as whiny as he suspected he did. (_Like a little brother,_ some small traitorous voice in the back of his head whispered, before he unceremoniously squashed it.) "We haven't seen _anybody_ go in or out. There's nobody in there. Nobody's coming back."

Dean pressed his lips together. He shot a quick glance at Sam, then at the apparently empty house. Rubbed a hand across his mouth in a gesture Sam had never seen before and which struck him as suddenly, terrifyingly familiar.

_I don't have a brother,_ he reminded himself fiercely.

"A few more minutes," Dean declared, with an air of final authority that left Sam gaping, as if Dean couldn't conceptualize a world where he wasn't the one giving the orders.

Sam swallowed back the angry retort, something petulant and childish like, "You're not the boss of me!" or "I never wanted your help in the first place!" Dean would just shoot him another ridiculous grin, and probably mock him some more.

The minutes stretched. Sam was uncomfortable and bored with this poor man's stakeout. There should at least have been doughnuts and coffee.

Mm. Coffee.

"Man, screw this, I'm going." Sam bit the words out and ignored Dean's alarmed protest as he clambered to his feet and headed for the fire escape. Shook off the hand on his arm and swung one leg over the edge of the roof, and only paused when Dean sprang cleanly over the lip and landed with a thud behind him, shaking the entire rickety structure.

"Dammit Dean!" he snarled, and shoved the other man for good measure, "You're gonna get us both killed!"

Expecting a cheeky grin and a smartass retort, he was taken aback when Dean grabbed his shoulders in an iron grip and hauled him down, until they were both crouching awkwardly behind the iron rail.

"_Shut up_ you jackass. Look! Look down there!"

Maybe it was the urgency in Dean's expression, the way his eyes managed to be both wide and narrowly piercing at the same time, which Sam was pretty sure was physically impossible. He was managing it, though, and digging his fingers into Sam's shoulder for good measure.

Sam looked.

"Holy _crap,_" he hissed, only remembering at the last moment to lower his voice. "That's—how did—I saw her—"

"Yeah," Dean said grimly.

"She was _bleeding_ from her _neck._ You like, garroted her! Or—is there some kind of technical ter—"

"_Shh_!" Dean clapped a hand over his mouth, looking scandalized. "Shut up! _Christ_," he continued in lower tones, "You're the—the most _Sam_ Sam I've ever _met_."

He wanted to ask if that was supposed to be some kind of compliment (and also what the hell that was supposed to mean, exactly), but judging by the look on Dean's face, he wasn't sure himself.

"Mmf," he retorted instead, and Dean rolled his eyes and drew back.

"How did she—it—they—_whatever—_how'd they even _find_ this place?"

Dean hoisted an eyebrow. "They're _machines,_ Sam, they're designed to adapt to new environments and collect data. And they're looking for you. They woulda found it sooner or later."

"Well…" he paused, and added, "Shit."

"Yeah," Dean agreed.

_Shit._

The little blonde thing in the pixie haircut with the smile like a shark, last seen dangling by her neck from an overpass and bleeding all over the place, was most definitely not dead. Sam boggled. Peering down from this distance, he couldn't tell if she showed any evidence of the injury Dean had inflicted with his mysterious invisible wire, or whatever it was he'd used, but she moved with a cheerful bounce in her step that suggested a lack of any real concern over any sort of life endangering injuries, and her head definitely wasn't wobbling in a way that suggested it was near to popping off.

Great. Fabulous.

"She doesn't look like much of a threat," Sam observed, cocking his head and keeping his voice low. The fact that he could actually _hear_ Dean roll his eyes was something he wasn't thinking about.

"Packaging's got nothing to do with it, Sam. She's stronger and faster than any normal human could hope to be, with the IQ of a nuclear physicist and the morals of New York insult comic. I caught 'em by surprise last time—that's how I managed to get in enough hits to scare them off. Now they know I'm around they'll be more careful. And she'll go straight through me to get to you."

"_Why_ does she want me, though? You didn't explain anything about that!"

Dean fidgeted. "It's complicated."

"More complicated than that spiel you gave me about the _war for the solar system_?"

"…yeah."

"You know, I can't believe I'm even having this conversation," Sam muttered.

"You're not. This is actually all a crazy dream." Dean paused, then added for good measure, "Crazy."

Sam surprised himself by snorting. It wasn't that Dean's deadpan delivery had been in any way funny, though. Sam was probably just in shock. He'd start freaking out later, when they were out of here. When _Sam_ was out of here. When they—he had Jess back. Then he could hold on and never, ever let go. And give Dean the boot for good measure.

Below them Blondie was circling around the rear of the house. Sam's lips thinned at the thought of that—whatever—walking across his kitchen floor. The one he and Jess took turns cleaning with that lemon-smelling stuff. Sam loved that stuff.

"Is there anything we can _do?_" he blurted, and resolutely did not wonder why he'd said 'we.' Dean didn't seem to have noticed Sam's suddenly inclusive attitude, as he continued staring with squinty-eyed determinationat the spot where the girl-thing had last stood. He slapped Sam roughly on the shoulder and got to his feet.

"There's at least one thing we can do," he said, and Sam was halfway down the fire escape before he even realized he was following the other man. As if it were the most natural thing in the world.

"_Dean,_" Sam hissed, drawing up behind him and resisting the sudden urge to shove him, "_Dean! _You wanna maybe _elaborate_ a little here?"

The self-satisfied grin flashed in his direction did absolutely nothing to calm Sam's sudden case of nerves, and neither did the words that followed.

"_Relax_, Sammy. This is what I'm _built_ for."

* * *

Dean honestly didn't know what the hell he was doing.

It wasn't that the part where he was sneaking up on a brokedown house, pursuing a cloud of intelligent nanomachines crammed into the body of a little blonde girl, without backup and no weapon but a spool of monofilament wire in his pocket, didn't seem pretty damn clear. He felt he had a good grasp on that whole situation. Where he was having _trouble_ with at the moment was in regards to the boy sneaking along with him, for all the world as if he'd been born to it. Which, okay, was a pretty fair assessment. But how much did Sam—_this_ Sam—really know? How much instinct and muscle memory did he retain, and how much had been lost or buried by the unknown number of years spent in the backwater off-planet shithole platform?

Hell, he'd already taken one nasty blow to the head for this kid. Did he really need another?

"_Sam_," he hissed, drawing up under the sill of the kitchen window and hauling the younger man in close, "You stay out here while I check the place out.

"What? No!"

Oh _God._

Every Sam, every time. It never failed.

"You _stay._ You're not even _armed_ for Chrissake. Just—stay here and shut the hell up, and hope Blondie doesn't notice you before she notices me."

He doesn't give Sam a chance to reply, turning away and ducking through the back door, ignoring the indignant sputtering going on behind him.

So predictable.

He eased himself carefully into a silent, open room that he recognized, after a moment's blankness, as a kitchen. It wasn't like any kitchen he'd ever been in—the tiles were colored, the walls too, and along with the pans and knives and cooking utensils were scattered strange wall hangings, and photos decorated the glossy surface of a white refrigerator.

In spite of himself, Dean padded across the floor and peered at the photos. Sam's face—the Sam crouched outside—smiled out at him, alongside his pretty blonde girlfriend and a crowd of other young people with wildly varying features. Some had big eyes, some small, some were wide-mouthed and some not. Black hair, red hair, some in shades that didn't occur in nature…Dean drew back, lip curling a little. He'd never seen _any_ of these faces before. Sam looked strange and vulnerable in that crowd of aliens.

He found himself wondering, again, where _this_ Sam's Dean was. Dead? Abandoned? Sacrificed? Or had he escaped as well, only to be recovered by hunters like Gordon and Kubrick? Had Sam mourned him? Did he even know what he'd lost?

_Take care of Sammy._

How could a Sam survive without his Dean?

He slipped along the counter, moving as soundlessly as he was able. No noise came from the other room, but that didn't really mean much. Chances were, Blondie knew he was here. In all probability she was lying in wait for him. Criminy. Didn't he have a responsibility to Jimmy? To Claire and Castiel? Why in hell was he here wasting time with a Sam who didn't know jack about shit, when he should be looking for Jimmy and maybe even saving his life?

He slipped around the corner into the half-destroyed room where he'd encountered the hunters and kicked the crap out of one of them. Silence reigned and it was, frankly, really really creepy. He stuffed a hand in his pocket and pulled out the spool of monofilament wire.

And froze when something cold and sharp tickled the hair at the back of his neck.

"Now now," Blondie said, in a voice _way_ too perky for Dean's own good, "My neck doesn't need any more ventilation in it, thank you very much. Just drop that on the floor there, sweet thing."

With a quiet curse, he did. The spool hit the floor with a soft _thump_ and he could _feel_ Blondie's smile.

"So," the perky voice continued, dripping smugness, "Our little Sammy isn't so alone after all. Shame."

"You leave him the hell alone, you _bitch."_

"Oh Dean. Clever threats never were your strong point. Why don't we just dispense with the foreplay and I'll gut you right here, okay peaches? Turn around now."

The knife bit into the skin of his neck sharply enough to draw blood, and Dean bared his teeth. He turned around, slowly, to face the girl he'd failed to kill, and glowered at her.

"Oh," she faked a pout, hip cocked and knife held just above his clavicle, "You're not happy to see me."

"It doesn't matter if you kill me," he said tightly. "You _know_ it doesn't."

She smiled widely.

"Oh come on. You're defective, Dean-o," she told him, voice matter-of-fact, "Otherwise you wouldn't be here. So we both know _exactly_ how much it matters."

"Go to hell."

"No such place, Dean. Not for lifeforms like us." She adjusted her grip on the knife, angling it and forcing Dean to drop to his knees or impale himself. He hit the floor without taking his eyes from her face.

He just hoped Sam had the good sense to run far, far away.

* * *

_Cuz Sam is famous for his good sense, right? ;)_

_TBC, probably. Hey, that rhymes!  
_


	9. Chapter 9

_Yeah, I'm pretty sure Cameron used _all the clichés_. *shakes fist* That made this a lot more difficult to write._

_I've been sitting on most of this for a while, so I went ahead and finished it up so I could get it posted. Cue flashbacks!_

* * *

**Every Snowflake….9/?**

_Dean had been thinking about names for a while._

Real _names, that is. Individual names. Not titles or classifiers, ID marks or even nicknames. Dean was thinking about _real_ names, the kind that _people_ had, out in the world. He understood the concept pretty well, he thought. He'd seen enough movies and done enough reading to understand the nature of designations applied to individuals, in a whole bunch of cultures. He thought it was interesting that while in most parts of the world, names were something given at or around birth, there were quite a few that had existed in which a person wasn't named until they turned a few weeks, months or even years old. And, he'd discovered, some people were given new names at various points in their lives, as they grew and achieved various cultural milestones. He was sort of in love with that idea, if he was being honest with himself._

_He hadn't told anyone about it, of course. Not even Sam. An admission of that magnitude would do more than make him the laughingstock of his entire class—even the other Deans—it would also draw the unwanted attention of the administrators. It was, in fact, an excellent way to get tagged in the database and frankly Dean had enough flags attached to his file as it was. This last one might very well push him over the edge, and he had no intention of letting anything of the sort happen. _

_He wasn't keeping a _list_, or anything. It wasn't as if he'd spent time flipping through baby-name books or scouring the AV libraries and then carefully noting down names that appealed to him. Okay, he'd thought about doing something like that, sure, but contrary to popular opinion, Dean was not actually particularly stupid. Yes, he had a history of certain…regrettable behaviors that had gotten him in trouble in the past and, yes, he was definitely on the Blue City's short list of Element Considered Potentially Unsatisfactory, but the fact that they hadn't yet bounced him out to be recycled meant that he knew when not to push things. He could play ball just as well as anybody else, when it was in his best interest to do so._

_It wasn't that individuality was frowned upon, of course. Personalities were expected and even _encourage_ to develop. Just not, Dean was pretty sure, to the extent his had._

_Even his Sam tended to look askance at some of the things Dean did. It…well, it kinda sucked, actually. Sam was supposed to be the one person who stood by Dean no matter what. Something had definitely gone wrong in the programming there—Dean just wasn't sure if it was his own or Sam's that was the problem. He tried not to think about it._

_At the moment, there were no Sams in sight—or anybody else, for that matter—and Dean was enjoying a rare solitary moment in the courtyard, bathed in the pale light of a mid-spring sun. Life in CR-Block-5 had certain benefits, not the least of which was the west-facing position that allowed the afternoon sun to sweep through the rooms, corridors and courtyards. A few Sams had taken it upon themselves to stick various green things in pots and scatter them in the best locations, and although Dean was pretty sure some of them were cactuses, they nevertheless gave the place a homey feeling. Not that he would ever tell them that. (Despite the issue of his own pride, ever other Dean in the City would shun him for the rest of his days. He was pretty sure.)_

_He squinted into the sky and tilted his head, trying to guess if any shapes were forming in the ragged clouds. He wasn't so good at it, he'd admit, mostly because he wasn't really sure what the point was. But it was something he'd come across on occasion as a thing that "people" did, and he was trying to fathom why, exactly, this was so._

_He hadn't told Sam about _that_, either._

_A babble of voices drifted from the far corridor. From the sound of it, a crowd of Claires was on their way to some appointment somewhere. Judging from the relative volume and a certain quality of squeakiness, he guessed they were about ten or so, and therefore probably headed to afternoon lessons. _

_They tumbled into the courtyard, giggling about little girl things, and Dean saw a 14y along with the three 10ys he'd expected. She grinned at him and offered a little wave. He didn't know this particular Claire, though he thought he vaguely recognized her purple scarf and copper bangles, but it didn't really matter. If she had a friendship with another Dean, even a younger model, then of course they all had a responsibility to her. He nodded and offered a small wave of his own. _

_He'd been young once. _

_They passed through the courtyard and the sun flashed off their scarves and jumpsuits and jewelry. He listened to them passing down the long white hall. Afternoon lessons meant ethics education and history of modern warfare, at that age. 14y was probably going along to ease them into the ideas of mass bloodshed and genocide from a perspective they could understand, and to help prepare them for the knowledge that was waiting a year down the line in the Practical Application module._

_Sam had enjoyed Practical Application. He was a perfect specimen, really._

_That was probably why Dean was sitting here alone in the courtyard._

_Sam was perfect._

* * *

It hurt. It _hurt_, and parts of him were hot and parts were cold and someone was making noise somewhere, a voice he knew, one he recognized.

"Shit, Sammy, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ why did you have to go and—why couldn't you just—oh _God._"

Hands pressed against his abdomen and he clawed at the hard surface below him. The floor? Why was he lying on the floor? It was hard and smooth and cold and didn't feel familiar at all.

_Home. Wanna go…home._

He was a long way from home. He was sure. Where was…?

"Stop moving you stupid—Christ Sammy, keep still!"

He heard a kind of high-pitched whining noise and his throat constricted. It _hurt_, his gut was soft and bloated and shredded and someone was whispering his name and choking on a sob.

"Why couldn't you just _run away?_"

He shivered and hauled open his eyes. A wash of light like underwater radiance sprayed across his vision. He flinched.

"You with me?" A hand clutched at his face. "Hey, you with me?"

_I'm not alone._ He breathed out. _I'm not—_he's_ here. He came back._

Or maybe that was wrong. One of them had left, but he couldn't remember which one.

"You…" he breathed, and the word died in the air, thin and fragile. But the face leaning over him, wide-eyed and familiar and beloved, softened. The mouth moved.

"Sam. You're gonna be—it's gonna be fine, okay? I'm gonna take care of you."

He reached up. His hand was heavy, his arm collapsing under his own weight, but he reached anyway. Got his fingers into short dark hair, curved a thumb against a pale cheek, smearing red across the skin.

"Dean," he said. "Dean."

* * *

"_Dean."_

_He looked up into Jimmy's face. The sympathy was too much. Too damn much. Dean pushed to his feet and crossed the room, glared at the wall._

"_No," he said sharply._

"_You need to come. Sam wants you to come."_

"_I can't. I'm not going to—to be a party to this. To _watch _this happen, as if it's—as if he—"_

"_He's been waiting for it all his life."_

_Dean clenched his jaw. Made fists._

"_You can't abandon him on the day of his ascension. It isn't fair."_

_He spun on the smaller man. Jimmy, to his credit, didn't flinch._

"_And what if it was Claire? _Your _Claire, would you want me standing here telling you to be happy, telling you she _needs your support?_ She wouldn't even remember you—after—he won't _know me._ I'll just be…and then what, I wait? Until it's my turn?"_

_Quietly, Jimmy repeated. "You have to come."_

"_I'm not going to watch my brother _die._"_

_Jimmy scowled. "It's ascension. He's not—"_

"_It's _death_ and you know that's all it is. I don't care what the hell they call it."_

"_Jesus." Jimmy sat down heavily on the sofa. "Jesus, Dean. Everything they ever said about you is true, isn't it?"_

_Dean stared at him, silent. Jimmy passed a hand over the back of his head. The moment stretched._

_Finally, Dean said, "Get out."_

"_I don't—"_

"_Get _out._ Don't come around here again. Don't talk to me. Don't look at me._ Don't._ This is it. We're through."_

_Jimmy stared at him, eyes wide and upset. He got slowly to his feet and rubbed his hands together._

"_Sam needs you there," he said quietly, and Dean turned away and shut his eyes._

_He didn't move when the door clicked shut._

_He didn't move for a long time._

* * *

_Note: Okay, seriously, I forgot completely about Dark Angel when I started writing this. So then I had to go back and try to remember whatever I could about it in order to avoid just wholesale ripping it off-clichés are fun in principle but not when they just make your story basically a crossover._

TBC! Yay!_  
_


End file.
